“Sharing Your Digital Collections,” is the 2nd of our online workshops for the digitally curious.
This workshop will take place on Friday, October 21, and is free and open to the public. No prior experience with digital projects is required! If you are interested in learning simple ways to build a home for objects on the web (e.g. old family papers, letters, photographs, journals, art works, etc.), this workshop is for you.
We have organized the workshop to make it easy to come and go. Join us for the morning, the afternoon, or the whole day, as your schedule permits. See below for more information, and feel free to share this invitation widely. To register, sign up at the registration link.
This hands-on workshop will consist of two sessions. In the first, which will begin at 9:00 am CST and end at 12:00 pm CST (with a break in between), we’ll discuss the big picture questions that drive work of this kind: among others, why should we create digital versions of paper documents in our possessions? What do or can digital archives look like, and what are the best practices for building them? How can we build them without getting (too) lost in the technological weeds? We will also discuss more practical questions: what factors should we consider when we scan a document? What kinds of equipment do we need? What is metadata and what does it help us do, once we have scanned the items in our collections?
The second session will run from 1:00pm CST to 4:00pm CST. It will feature Devin Becker, Olivia Wikle, and Evan Williamson: a team of librarians based at the University of Idaho who have developed a project called CollectionBuilder. Put briefly, CollectionBuilder gives you everything you need to build a website for your digital collection. In this session, Becker, Wikle, and Williamson will tell you what you need to know to begin using this platform on your own. In the weeks following the workshop, we will hold three “office hours” sessions for anyone who needs additional help or consultation.