Virtually United: Bringing Disparate Museum and Library Collections Together in Digital Exhibitions
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Although university libraries and museums overlap in their core educational mission, differences in institutional history, philosophy, and protocols often result in incompatible data management, making it challenging to pursue projects integrating their collections. These challenges can be compounded by the linguistic and material particularities of Asian collections. The University of Oregon Libraries and Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art recently received a Mellon grant to enhance collaborative use of library/museum assets. The grant funded the creation of digital exhibitions, three of which focus on Japanese or Chinese materials. This roundtable presents these three projects as a case study of collaborative digital research and exhibition production. The responsible scholars are joined by representatives from the Libraries and the Museum to discuss the respective merits of technology platforms, the challenges of working digitally with non-Western materials, and the pros/cons of online exhibitions as sites for collaboration between institutions. Franny Gaede will present the perspective of the UO Libraries staff who contributed the technical builds and collaborated closely at every stage of these projects. She will discuss the organizational and technological challenges presented by this kind of collaboration, and share insights gained in overcoming them
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Virtually United: Bringing Disparate Museum and Library Collections Together in Digital Exhibitions
- 1. CREATION COLLABORATION CELEBRATION Supporting Collections-Based Research Through Digital Scholarship Projects
- 2. FRANNY GAEDE Director, Digital Scholarship Services
- 3. Sponsorship & Support ◦ With thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their continuing support for the UO GLAM Alliance through “Leveraging GLAM Assets in Research, Teaching, and Learning: Mellon Faculty Fellowships to Advance Library-Museum Collaboration” ◦ The staff of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art ◦ The staff of the University of Oregon Libraries, especially Digital Scholarship Services, Application Design & Integration, Collection Services, Data Services, Administrative Services, and Research and Instructional Services units ◦ Our Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, Jenny Krieger and Ben Gillespie ◦ Our Mellon Graduate Employees, Liam Maher, Tom Fischer, and Aqsa Khan ◦ Our PIs Adriene Lim and Jill Hartz
- 4. the technology is exciting! but, as usual, it’s all about the people
- 5. Roles & Responsibilities Who is important, but also what do they do? ◦ Research ◦ Project Management ◦ Technology Support ◦ Digitization ◦ Metadata Coordination ◦ Build ◦ Quality Assurance ◦ Sustainability & Updates
- 6. OMEKA S
- 7. Considerations for Asian Collections ◦ Support for top-to-bottom, right-to-left script varies between plugins ◦ Line spacing for mixed-script text was not accommodated by default fonts ◦ Minimal support for multilingual sites
- 8. thank you
Editor's Notes
- Hello! I’m calling these brief prepared remarks “Creation, Collaboration, Celebration: Supporting Collections-Based Research Through Digital Scholarship Projects” – and over the next few minutes, I’d like to talk about my and the University of Oregon Libraries’ role in bringing the projects you’ve heard about to fruition.
- A face for the disembodied voice you’re hearing. My name is Franny Gaede and I am the Director of Digital Scholarship Services.
- A brief note of thanks. First to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, without whom none of this would be possible. Their continued support has enabled a truly enormous amount of work on this grant. The staff of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the staff of the University of Oregon Libraries, including my amazing colleagues in Digital Scholarship Services, Application Design and Integration, Collection Services, Data Services, Administrative Services, and Research and Instructional Services. Our Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, Jenny Krieger and Ben Gillespie, both of whom have gone on to have amazing careers, our Mellon Graduate Employees, Liam Maher, Tom Fischer, and Aqsa Khan, and our original PIs, Adriene Lim and Jill Hartz, who have both departed the project, but whose vision set us down this road and helped us build these strong relationships.
- I have the word Digital prominently in my title and I LOVE talking about technology and tools, platforms and products. It’s the part that brings people in – in many ways, lowering the barrier to entry to scholarship and research that’s otherwise out of reach, whether it’s in a scholarly journal or a monograph – making it accessible, attractive, and interactive. And, uhhhh, I’m definitely going to talk about technology a tiny bit, because that’s a major part of our output – how we brought our collections together, how this research was shared – but the technology is just the tiniest little bit of the iceberg. It’s all about the people.
- The individuals who worked on these projects are identified on each website, giving credit where credit is due, one of the most important things we do! And for every single project there was one or more people dedicated to each of these roles. Performing original research – our faculty who have presented for you today, our postdoctoral scholars and graduate employees who supported them and conducted supplementary research. Our postdoctoral scholars and members of library staff providing project management, while designers and developers at the Libraries offered technology support. Staff at both the Libraries and JSMA created hundreds of new digital images and coordinated metadata creation and crosswalking to allow entry into our exhibit platform and contribution back to our respective digital asset management systems. Our postdoctoral scholars, graduate employees, library and museum staff, and faculty all helped build these projects and check to make sure they were as perfect as we could make them, and after they were released into the world, making sure they have all the appropriate security updates, are on the most stable version of the platform, and don’t experience downtime given their presence on shared servers with other library websites. It takes an absolute village – and while some of these roles are technical in nature, many are not and require expertise in other areas of expertise. The other thing I will note is that many persist past the immediate planning and build of the project! When we take on a project like these, this is a long-term commitment, though not an eternal one. Technical projects have a limited lifespan, though we do make every effort to ensure both the intellectual labor and the digitized objects are made as permanent as possible.
- The three projects highlighted here are all on the Omeka S platform, which is a newer addition to the pantheon of content management systems used in digital humanities projects. Some of you may have worked with Omeka before or are familiar with Omeka Classic, which is still widely used! We were interested in working with Omeka S for a number of reasons – first, it would allow us to have a shared object pool from which we could draw for multiple exhibits while only entering the metadata for those objects once. Second, it has what is called multisite capability – one installation, multiple independent sites associated with it. WordPress is probably the most popular multisite content management system people are familiar with – and Omeka S makes it easier for us to create new Omeka sites for our faculty and give us the opportunity to change up metadata schemas, themes, plugins, etc. We didn’t necessarily want or need to do that for this set of projects, but this was a tool we wanted to adopt in the long-term for digital humanities projects on the University of Oregon campus. Finally, the S in Omeka S stands for semantic and would allow us to take advantage of the linked data work that the Libraries have been doing with our Oregon Digital cultural heritage repository platform at some point in the future. Again, long-term goals – but something with some exciting possibilities for the future and aligning with our existing platforms.
- I wanted to talk about a few considerations for Asian collections and exhibits that we encountered on Omeka S that weren’t specific to any one project – first, support for top-to-bottom and right-to-left script varies depending where you are in the site. Some text areas and plugins support it perfectly, while others don’t work at all. Your mileage may vary, depending on what you’re looking to support. Along those lines but more of a design quirk – the default font did not handle mixed-script text very well. When we would have both kanji and latin characters on a given line, the spacing would be thrown off. And finally, there’s minimal support for multilingual sites. If you want a Korean/English site, you’re going to be doing double the work at the moment. But that is also one of the reasons we were interested in working with Omeka S – it was an opportunity to do some work on the cutting edge and help push development in the directions we wanted it to go.