Digital Collections Projects
Check below for descriptions of different digital collections projects I have worked on, including projects at the Wisconsin Historical Society, as Collections Associate for the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP), and as a student.
State Historic Preservation Office, Wisconsin Historical Society. I currently work in the State Historic Preservation Office, a division within the Wisconsin Historical Society, to scan archeology reports (using Adobe Acrobat) and create PDFs (including some large format maps) that fulfill state and federal historic preservation guidelines and statutes for various building projects throughout the state. I also perform quality control on the scans and do some metadata cleanup when I upload scans to the Wisconsin Historic Preservation Database, which serves archeologists working within the state and around the country. Additionally, I maintain a spreadsheet that tracks scanning, uploading, and location of the paper reports. I also work to resolve errors between paper reports and database records. The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. In my position with the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy (AIHP), I worked on both analog and digital projects. For a collection of health education poster sets created for retail pharmacy windows in the 1950s (by Frank Pinchak), I wrote the descriptive metadata. For two collections of drug advertisements dating from the 1950s and 1960s (the James Harvey Young Drug Advertisements and the Mickey Smith Drug Advertisements, respectively) I scanned the images, created the descriptive metadata, and ingested completed records into the AIHP digital library hosted on Omeka. View these collections here. I also participated in a joint project with the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center (UWDCC), working in FileMaker Pro to create metadata for 500 photos from the Drug Topics photo archive, for the first phase of this project. Wisconsin Historical Society. The Citizen Petition Access and Digitization Project was funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC) of the National Archives. As the Project Librarian, I created the descriptive metadata for 2500 citizen petitions written by residents of Wisconsin Territory, and then the State of Wisconsin, in the years 1836-1891; I also developed and documented a subject terms list and an overall metadata schema. Additionally, I built 2500 individual spreadsheets to prepare each metadata record for import into the digital platform, CONTENTdm. Residents used this petition format as a way to communicate with the legislature to request roads, bridges, dams, canals, to operate ferries, to request the division of counties and the formation of new towns, to build schools, and so on. These petitions tell the story of Wisconsin's history--how land was settled and used, how towns, cities, and counties developed and grew, how people and goods moved, and how the growing society took on the issues of poverty, temperance, suffrage, statehood, and the Civil War. The metadata for this project will greatly expand access and serve a variety of audiences, including National History Day students, Wisconsin residents wishing to know more about their state's history, and scholars and historians studying the ways in which Wisconsin's story reflects the larger story of the nation. To help promote the citizen petition project and digital collection, I wrote social media posts for WHS Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages, and a short article in the WHS quarterly newsletter, Columns. In 2021, this collection will also be accessible at Recollection Wisconsin and the Digital Public Library of America. Wisconsin Historical Society. Working on a 120-hour practicum for the Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Lab, I scanned over 100 photos from a northern Wisconsin girls' camp, circa 1930-1955, known as Joy Camps (view the image gallery and essay I created). I also created an item record for each image by assigning metadata to describe each image. As a capstone to the project, I wrote an article about this camp for the Wisconsin Magazine of History, which was published in the Summer 2015 issue. LIS 551, Organization of Information. For a final project in this course, we formed groups and examined the metadata that different organizations use. My group studied the metadata schema created for use with art collections, Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA ), and we reported on the great variety of usage among institutions that we researched. My contribution to the final report can be found here. LIS 879, Digital Libraries. For my final project in this course, I selected 10 books from a collection of Scholastic books I still have from my elementary school days; see the related images on the upper right of this page. I selected the front and back covers of each title, as well as each title page. I scanned these three images for each book on an Epson scanner and created metadata for each in CONTENTdm (this collection appeared for a brief time on a website created for our class). I elected to create an "object description," which would describe the full book, and then metadata for each front cover, back cover, and title page. Click on each image for an enlarged view. Please note the screen shots included on this page are from only one of the titles I worked on: Pippi In the South Seas. There were lots of decisions to make when creating this collection--please view my Scholastic Book Covers working paper for all of the steps I took to create this digital library. LIS 853, Metadata Standards and Applications. You can also view the metadata schema I created with classmates for the final project in this course. For this project we cataloged hiking trails in Midwestern states in the United States, naming our schema MOTD for Midwest Outdoor Trail Description. Included with our report is a crosswalk mapping our schema to MODS. |