HIST319 - Intro to Public History - Dr. Burg

Digitization can be one of the leading challenges of most archives.

Challenges:

• Time, Space, Equipment, Money, Staff, Knowledge

Advantages:

• We will discuss this in class

Outsourcing: Sending materials to a company who specialize in safely scanning unique collections. They do the work for you. Shippensburg Archives has used Backstage. This can be very expensive. There are several factors that determine cost: size and condition of the materials to be scanned, quantity, and pick-up/delivery. Outsourcing is convenient for an archives who are faced with one or more of the challenges listed above.

The Shippensburg University Archive uses Islandora and ArchivesSpace for their digital management.

ISLANDORA:

Islandora is an open-source digital asset management system. It is a way to manage digital collections that can be accessed and viewed by the public. The metadata standard used in IS is MODS, Dublin Core, etc. It supports any XML standard.

ARCHIVESSPACE:

ArchivesSpace is an open-source archives information management system that Shippensburg University Archives uses to manage and display the descriptive finding aids created for each record group and other manuscript collections. We can also use it to manage our accessions. The metadata standard used in AS is DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard), but it will support other standards such as MODS, XML, Dublin Core, etc)

Both DAMs require extensive knowledge and can consume a great deal of an archivists' time.