SOIS Goal 3
Navigate, curate and create information across the spectrum of human records.
Outcome 3a
In Digital Curation, my final project was to develop a curation plan for three donated collections. Each collection had a particular significance of being works that were aged to a point where they were not readily available through simple online searches. Because access to these collections was a challenge this curation plan necessary. The understanding is that the collections had some historical significance and needed to be set up in an online space that would allow people access to research, observe or share for future needs.
Such is the case with many items that are born digital. Because the digital world changes and evolves so rapidly, all works or ideas significant or insignificant are quickly hidden by the newest event or digital creation. As librarians, we sometimes may have the tasks of evaluating digital collections or archives for a cultural, scientific, or historical consequence and then be charged with the job of preservation. I was fortunate to complete this assignment to learn and practice those concepts.
Outcome 3b
In Digital Humanities, we used the HathiTrust to do textual analysis. The HathiTrust houses several books, journal articles, and conference papers that have digitized for preservation. We had been given student access, and weekly used the resource to pull down groups of works which we formed into collections to practice analyzing data. I learned how to take this data and organize it in a way that makes sense to answer questions about the texts and to make observations about the data that would generally not be apparent from just a simple read of the text. A great benefit of this type of research and learning is understanding data in new ways and to expand the capacity of the researcher could accomplish. I am fortunate to have temporary access to this tool and can imagine recommending it in the future. (Listed here are a token cloud I created and an excel spreadsheet of some data I analyzed)
Outcome 3c
In my Metadata course I completed a schema report on ONIX and PREMIS that allowed me to understand metadata further. Both concepts were new for me, and at first, I was intimidated by the complications of the steps. Fortunately, that is why we practice, to build skills. Each week we would build on each of the processes to make our experience stronger. When reviewing the literature about how and why each schema is chosen, I was able to gain clarity on which schema would be appropriate for future projects.