Presented by Stephanie Beene at the Annual Conference of the Visual Resources Association, April 3rd - April 6th, 2013, in Providence, Rhode Island.

1. CSI:
Capturing the essence,
preserving the past
Senior Studio Art
@ Lewis & Clark College:
e Archives, 1993-2013

2. CSI
• C – Collaborative Creation
• S – Scalable & Sustainable
• I – Intuitive, Integrated, & Iterative
(CSI bring to mind detectives, investigation,
and forensics? Good! is project
encompassed all of three of these)

3. Facets of the project
• Preservation (institutional history, digital, archival,
metadata, intellectual)
• Development and Design of a new online
archives.
– Collaboration with project team
– ID stakeholders & audience
– List of desirables (investigation of platforms)
– Goals & outcomes
– Timeline & workflow
– Assessing the stages of work (digitizing, cataloging,
migration, development, etc.)
• Iterative design feedback loop: faculty & students

7. e original format, 1993-2007

8. e
intermediate
format
2008-2009

9. e last episode: Digital images (jpegs) 2008-11

13. Desirables for new system
• Functionality:
– Search & browse by (graduating) year, artist, studio
specialty (worktype)
– Needed to be intuitive in design
– Needed to be aesthetically pleasing for our target
audience
– Needed both closed and open systems because of
evolution of copyright & IPR policies

14. Lessons applied from other projects
• Metadata creation & collaboration
• Ways of viewing, ways of searching/browsing
• Ways the site might be used
• Feedback loop!
• Sustainability and scalability

15. Settling on Omeka
• Exhibits plug-in
• Aesthetic design
• Flexible and scalable
• Easy to upload items; A/V items too!
• Intuitive – a “google” like search bar with good
results; a robust “advanced search” feature with
fields easily modified by admins
• Quick fixes and more than one admin
(collaborative metadata and collaborative
exhibits)
• We had the human resources

28. Takeaways
• It’s always evolving
• Overall, a great success!
• Omeka is *SUPER* flexible (which is a good
thing, but can also be a bad thing)
• Other things are written in code and NOT
flexible
• e value of institutional history surmounts any
pain of digitizing and investigation
• e response to the site – faculty, students,
alumni, pub-com, external constituents – has been
overwhelmingly positive