Digital Heritage Collections

Project description

Supervisors/Collaborators

Professor Trish Williams and Prof Anthony Maeder

Outline

Design a software system for managing collections of digitized heritage items pertaining to a particular subject area (e.g. local history), ideally capable of being machine readable/indexable. The collection items may include written or printed documents, books, drawings, photographs, audio and video recordings: a sample set of typical items will be provided to establish a baseline.

Aim of Project

The aim of this project is to develop a design and implementation plan for a Digital Heritage Collections. The design is to be based on a requirements specification.

Scope of Project and Methods/Equipment

This project will involve a requirements specification phase based on interviews with domain experts familiar with heritage collections and library methodology. Examples of comparable resources created for a similar purpose should be examined initially and critiqued to assist with scoping. A further design phase will provide a description of all functional elements of the system and associated data schemas. A plan for implementing the resulting design will be produced, using a suitable existing software platform (e.g. Omeka or Greenstone) and/or a web environment. An initial prototype implementation of the software system will be developed and demonstrated on the sample set if time permits. Capability for automated loading of content and exporting content in standard format is desirable.

Impact/Relevance

Numerous small collections of physical artifacts and documents of heritage value exist as private holdings or in community groups. If these could be digitised and indexed easily and consistently, it would enable wider online sharing to numerous other communities of interest. This project considers how a standardised underlying software environment and digitising protocol can be created to achieve this.

Timeline

Honours / 18 Unit Masters / 9 Unit Masters (MIT, at least 2 students).

Preferred Skills

Basic research skills required. Technical abilities to comprehend and develop technical specifications with respect to hardware and software that may be specified in a design. Systems analysis and design, user/expert interview techniques, requirements specification, database and schema techniques, indexing and search techniques, web applications development.

References

Wikipedia entry on Dublin Core provides some conceptual background for desired system data representation capabilities.  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core  ) Trove is an example of a sophisticated commercially developed collections environment. ( https://trove.nla.gov.au/ )   ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trove ) Many other examples exist at individual institution level (e.g. museums). Omeka ( https://omeka.org/ ) and Greenstone ( https://www.greenstone.org/ ) are examples of platform software available for customising to suit specific digital collections management needs.

Assumed knowledge

Basic research skills required. Technical abilities to comprehend and develop technical specifications with respect to hardware and software that may be specified in a design. Systems analysis and design, user/expert interview techniques, requirements specification, database and schema techniques, indexing and search techniques, web applications development.

Note: You need to register interest in projects from different supervisors (not a number of projects with the one supervisor).
You must also contact each supervisor directly to discuss both the project details and your suitability to undertake the project.