Notes on Digital Online Archives

We have already viewed several digital online collection sites in the course, and I haven't even mentioned formal archival sites like

• The Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center publishes a monthly newsletter (Found in the Archives) which you can subscribe to here. There is also information about the records available there at that site.
• the National Archives
• Virginia Memory (We've already noted the Library of Virginia.)
• George Mason University Special Collections Research Center (Try also George Mason University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives.)
• or the different county archives in Northern Virginia
• Archive.org is a huge, online archive of free items in all kinds of formats
• New Museum Digital Archive?
• Historical Aerials
• Penn Pilot (Historic Aerial Photographs of Pennsylvania)
• Please suggest additions to the list.

There are many ways to create a database and then display the database items on the web. The method that you choose usually depends on (1) size of the collection, (2) the complexity of your display and the elements of interaction on the web and (3) your programming skills, or your access to someone else's programming abilities.

The simplest way to display a collection would be to just put all of your items (for example, as jpg files) into a folder, and then display each of those items on a web page using standard HTML design (or asp--active server pages). You've seen something like this with my newspaper fragments.

Another way is to put all of your items into a database, for example using the popular MySQL, and then use php or asp to display items as they are "called" or "requested" for display on a web page. This requires a bit more know-how. The Avalon Project is an example of this.

The most complicated way of putting a database/collection online is the way that Amazon.com, for example, does it.

The staff at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason developed the Omeka software platform, which is an open-source software that allows you to display a collection/database on the web. It is highly customizable, allowing you to tinker with the design of the Omeka display to best fit your particular project. But let me add that the customizing process can be very time consuming unless you know exactly what you are doing and have some knowledge of CSS.

So, I have settled on Omeka for my projects, which now include:

• Slatington Postcards
• the Northern Virginia Digital History Archive
• Historical Memory
• Amy Bertsch used the hosted Omeka software for her project exhibit on the Charles M. Robinson schoolhouses.

 

My problem has always been mastering the set up of the software on a server and then working with the code to fix design elements. Since I have never really been trained with PHP or MySQL (not to mention my only basic knowledge of CSS), there is a lot of trial and error involved in trying to fix things. I fix something in the code and then see what happens, and either continue or try again

There is also a problem of archival scale that I have discovered. As a collection project gets bigger, you immediately become aware of problems that you should have resolved at the very beginning of your design steps. For example, if you don't have an agreed-upon set of tags (and META categories) at the start, it suddenly becomes very labor intensive to go back through 1000 items and add descriptive tags for each item.

One help in the trial-and-error design process used to the the Firebug plugin which worked with the Firefox browser and allowed you to look at the specific coded areas of a web page so that you can try and figure out what code to fix. The plugin is no longer available, but Firefox now has a special browser called Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition with a bunch of built-in tools.