Fall Projects in Digital Archives

This Fall I participated in two digital archives projects, where I served on the metadata team. The first was an oral history archive for dance journalist, Barbara Newman, who had a collection of interviews from the 1970s to this past year, in which she spoke with dancers, choreographers and others affiliated in the dance community. The interviews were primary sources for Ms. Newman's book Grace Under Pressure. The website, Dance Dialogues, is a compilation of interviews from several of her books. I participated on the metadata team, where we ensured that our classmates' records were properly tagged with our selected schema. I also digitized interviews with Mark Morris and tagged and uploaded interviews with Katie Wade and Robert Denvers.

The second project was for the American Jewish Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History with their Jews in America project. The goal of the project is to create a gateway to Jewish heritage artifacts at institutions across the United States. My team selected the Charleston College Low Country Digital Library, which has a rich collection of oral histories and papers from American Jewry in the Charleston region. We selected collections from LCDL that best fit the Jews in America vision, harvested metadata and URLs from the collection and delivered it to AJHS for inclusion in their database. I recently ran into Susan Malbin at the 2nd Annual METRO Conference, who told me that the Charleston team was one of two of the four class projects that would likely be included in the Jews in America repository. Congrats, Team!