Per our discussion of Omeka and of archival metadata last class, I thought I would share my first (and to this date only) foray into the world of Omeka.
The Schlater project is a group assignment that has been utilized for the past few years in our Public History Method & Theory class. It involves a collection of World War II correspondence between the grandparents of Angie Schlater, a former Loyola Public History PHD student. The collection is vast, comprising of several-page long letters from most days spanning several years during the war. Though the letters form the crux of the collection, photographs and various ephemera are also included.
I’ve a personal stake in this project, as I have been digitizing the letters for Angie on and off for the past year- and I hope to finish it up sometime in the near future. However, this Omeka site is one that my group created during class in the fall of 2010. Looking back on it now, with far more comprehensive familiarity with the letters themselves, I’m able to grasp just how valuable a site like Omeka can be in terms of utilizing metadata for navigating archival content.