LIS 5823: Archival Internship
Instructor: J.A. Pryse / Fall, 2019
The Dick T. Morgan Project
Introduction and Instructions for Internship:
The Dick T. Morgan Project was created in order to fulfill the needs of the Morgan family for research and biographic purposes. David Morgan, great grandson of Dick T. Morgan, provided the Center with $12,000 to digitize and make available the entire Dick Morgan Collection. (click on the link for the enitre collection on the Arc platform).
The ARC platform is actually web-based archives information management system. Read more about ArchivesSpace here: https://archivesspace.org/about/mission .
The first steps will be learning the system and some basic components to creating a digital collection. Sounds easy right? Well technically it is BUT there are many components to completing a successful project.
Start:
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Navigate to the DropBox file ArchivesSpace, Metadata, Basic Training
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Complete Phase 1
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Next, navigate to Morgan Box 6 and Box 7
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Look over the excel sheets that Lauren Parker has completed. This is an item level sheet that has many elements that will assist future generations and researchers discover information in this collection. Each and every element is necessary.
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Take a look at the folders and how they are organized, named, sectioned, etc…These are what we call the ACCESS COPIES. No matter how many times we open the images it is OK because we have 3 sets of MASTER, MASTER ACCESS, and PRESERVATION, copies in additional places.
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Navigate to https://dicktmorgan.omeka.net/ The Dick T. Morgan Digital Collection
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Sign in the Admin site by adding admin/ to the extension above
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User name: DickTMorgan – Password: Omegains1!
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Browse all of the ‘collections’ and how they are structured – NOTE: you will not use all of the metadata collected in the Omeka platform, note the fields and descriptions
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Also, the titles of the folders (called collections in Omeka) are pre-determined and can be found in in ArchivesSpace or https://arc.ou.edu/. Search Dick T. Morgan and the collection will show up.
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Now that we all are familiar with Dick Morgan and the mission we can begin to work through this and by the end of the semester have a good amount of data on the website
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Open the Morgan Box 8 folder and move to the PDF folder. These are the documents you will attach to the Omeka site. The metadata will be collection from the PDF but with reference to the .tiff images as far as administrative and structural metadata is concerned. The images you see are the .jpg version of the original .tiff. They were scanned at 600dpi by the Epson that Lauren references in step 3a above. Use this information as the digital image program and scanner programs.
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Once Box 8 is complete we will move to Box 9 – checking beforehand what has been previously added and what has not.
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Your job is to work on this project through your internship.
My Experience:
This internship has been another great resource to draw practical experience from. Working with the same instructor that I had for Archival Presentation was really a continuation of that class. The Dick T. Morgan project has many different artifacts and documents to process. I was responsible for getting as much of the description at the item level of each box I was assigned. The collection spans the years of 1880-1928. I was fascinated by the amazing documents, books, pamphlets, and photos that I came across. I could easily spend the majority of my career processing archives.
I used Excel to enter each description element and encountered new elements that I had not worked with before. One was geo-coding, which gives us the general location that an artifact or document originated from. The other element, file version checksum provides a unique code of digits and letters that help maintain the integrity of the file in the future. I was also introduced to extend of container summary, which records how one item fits into that count and how.
I also was able to work with the Omeka platform again, and added each item description and its photograph to the collection for public access.
I enjoyed doing this work, and hope to do more in the future. Although we had a few technical bumps along the way, I learned from them, will refer to them in the future, and count this internship as a incredible way to end my academic work for this degree.
