TRUE (AND FALSE)

STRUCTURED DATA IS ESSENTIAL FOR ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTION & DISCOVERY

Presented by Barbara Aikens

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

SAA, 2010

TAKING FULL ADVANTAGE OF STRUCTURED DATA

Create interesting, lively, meaningful, and web-appropriate online presentations

Repurpose Data

Visualize Data

Harvest Data

Share Data

Provide Context to Data

USING USABILITY STUDIES

Recent online usability studies conducted by the Northwest Digital Archives consortia; University of North Carolina; Archives of American Art; and many other repositories.

Are users confused by the actual structured data or the presentation of the structured data?

PROVIDING MEANING AND CONTEXT: DATA VISUALIZATION & MINING

“Elastic Lists” – visualization prototype developed by Michele Combs at Syracuse University Libraries (see http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/ElasticLists-EAD/binv4/bin/ )

“Archives Z” (Visualizing Archives) - Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, formerly at U. Md. (see http://www.spellboundblog.com/2010/07/07/archivesz-needs-you/)

“The Visible Archive” – visualization project developed by Mitchell Whitelaw at the University of Canberra, Australia (see http://visiblearchive.blogspot.com/)

“Bungee View” – data mining and visualization prototype developed by Mark Durthick, currently used for American Memory images at the Library of Congress (ttp://cityscape.inf.cs.cmu.edu/bungee/) . YouTube video demo link also available at http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/10/bungee_image_collection_browser.html

“Neatline Project” – geospatial and temporal visualization tool being developed by the Scholars Lab at the University of Virginia Library (http://www.scholarslab.org/projects/neatline/ )

FALSE

STRUCTURED DATA IS ESSENTIAL FOR ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTION & DISCOVERY

OBJECTS, BOOKS, ARCHIVAL MATERIALS, AND IMAGES TOGETHER IN ONE

DATABASE Alexander Calder

National Postal Museum (5)

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (48)

Smithsonian American Art Museum (32)

National Portrait Gallery (30)

Smithsonian Institution Libraries (192)

Photograph Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum (301)

Archives of American Art (160)

Archives of American Gardens (15)

Smithsonian Institution Archives (9)