Cataloging

Cataloging

Hadassah Damien (open flows & the interference archive) & DKG (Daniel Gilmore)

What is the set of things that we have to catalog?

Things we collect:

• information about the military in Hawaii (use wordpress)
• library, objects at a hacker space, (use labatrack moving to my celia)
• digital documents that are related
• wikis, archiving a site
• digital arciving project & oral history project, training materials, posters, graphics, training kits, tshirts
• video footage, software archiving
• pamphlets, posters, pictures
• historic documents – letters, flags, newspaper clippings, photos
• built an archive using drupal – digital zine
• database of businesses
• zine library, omeka – curriculum - github

Software we use:

• labatrack
• wordpress
• drupal
• omeka

Why Keep Stuff? Why Inventory?

• reference
• reuse
• value
• what stories do we tell as a society – history/herstory
• search
• to understand the collection
• communities - responsibility to the community, expectations of the community

Key to determine - Who is going to be using it?

• open to the public? private? partly private?
• copyright issues?

How to we start collecting meta data & inventorying these things?

Ephemera – not traditional texts – like pamphlets, newspaper clippings – things that lack common characteristics that would allow them to be cataloged together

With physical collections – things that are in the realm of the possible are not necessarily in the realm of the probable – for example - can inventory everything (& make that accessible to the public) without digitizing its content

Need to figure out what you are going to track about the collection:

• Dublin Core is a standard set of things to keep track of – formatting and syntax Dublin Core Wikipedia

Diving Deeper into 2 Tools:

• omeka
  • ABC no Rio – art archive, art zines, art center, collectively run, has a permanent collection
  • comes of the Roy Rosening New Media Lab
  • open source
  • collect management software – similar to wordpress
    • has hosted version
    • upload it to server & interface is similar to wordpress
    • has powerful tags
    • can add pages
  • can set up collections & exhibits

• collective access
  • “like the drupal of cataloging and arciving”
  • info about things can be more fine grained and defined
  • different interfaces for public vs catalogers or different levels of catalogers
  • can define different object types for the things
  • entities who create your entrys are cataloged along with the works – who is editor, who made it,
  • allows for a more nuianced view of the data
  • low res. & full versions
  • can determine what is available to the public vs private, on individual level & collection level

Also, Mukurtu connects with Drupal.