Digital Sediment: Migration of digitized collections to a central access portal at Ingenium
Thursday October 15, 2020
From 3:15pm to 3:45pm
Launched in April 2018, Ingenium’s Digital Archives is now the central point of access of Ingenium’s digitized archival holdings. The portal brings together collections that had previously been made available through curated web exhibits or focused image banks. This presentation will take a frank look at our successes and failures so far.
Document
Launched in April 2018, Ingenium’s Digital Archives is now the central point of access of Ingenium’s digitized archival holdings. The portal brings together collections that had previously been made available through curated web exhibits or focused image banks. We have found treasure and a lot of skeletons as we dig through the digital sedimentary layers of over 20 years of digitization projects! Old access issues have been migrated to the new technological environment along with the assets themselves: unilingual metadata; transparency of the descriptive process; use of general or precise keywords; rights statements or lack thereof; image quality, etc… Also, a new understanding of appropriate management of Indigenous content has upset our old way of thinking – is giving more access to a general internet audience necessarily the best way to serve all audiences and our collections? Spoiler alert: the answer is no! While we anticipated the need to share authority with an appeal for crowd-sourced metadata, we began migration without re-examining all our existing collections in the light of today’s ethical values. When the dust settles and future archivists dig up Ingenium’s Digital Archives, what will its fossilized remains and surrounding sedimentary layers say about it? This presentation will take a frank look at our successes and failures so far.
