Embedded Files
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institutions.
I was honored to be chosen as the paid intern for the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage; I spent ten weeks honing my digital archiving skills in Adobe Bridge and the Smithsonian's Digital Asset Management System. I also got a taste of what it would be like to work as an archivist within a large system.
I was honored to be chosen as the paid intern for the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage; I spent ten weeks honing my digital archiving skills in Adobe Bridge and the Smithsonian's Digital Asset Management System. I also got a taste of what it would be like to work as an archivist within a large system.
My work was the continuation of a specific project related to digitized images from the Festival of American Folklife (now Smithsonian Folklife Festival). A contractor had digitized images from 1967 to 1995, but they were not organized in an easily accessible fashion nor were they fully available to staff or public. I began by carefully studying the programs and finding aids for each year's Festival of American Folklife. Armed with knowledge of the cultures, themes and featured performers, I reviewed each year’s Festival photographs individually, determining if keywords had been correctly applied.
Cover Image from the 1975 Festival Program
Screenshot of a sorted images with metadata applied in Adobe Bridge.
Image of digital contact sheets generated for the 1980 Festival of American Folklife.
For each year, I organized photos by aligning them to existing series in the online finding aids, producing digital contact sheets for each series.
Click image to view the 1989 Tracker.
Throughout that process, I created spreadsheets for each Festival year that accounted for each photo’s classification as well as the keywords used to describe contact sheets.
Often, I would add keywords to the master list, ensuring the photographs were described appropriately. I even generated keyword lists for unprocessed images from 1983 and 1985 and applied them to thousands of photos using Adobe Bridge. I also uploaded the images from those years to the Smithsonian's Digital Asset Management System (DAMS).
The final step was uploading the digital contact sheets to the Smithsonian's Digital Asset Management System and linking them to the public-facing Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives using ArchiveSpace.
Items ready for import to the DAMS were placed in the MASTER folder; in the CATEGORY folder, there was a text file with information about the imports' placement within the DAMS . To trigger the import process the file ready.txt was copied and pasted into the MASTER folder, alerting the system to a pick-up.
These digital contact sheets from the 1983 Festival were placed in the general Contact Sheets folder because they were aligned with Series 1 of the Finding Aid.
Using the DAMS' issued Unique Asset Name, the contact sheets were linked in ArchivesSpace to the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives, ensuring they became part of the existing finding aids as digital objects. In the screenshot above, the 1983 Festival's "Program Books, Festival Publications and Ephemera, 1983" has three digital objects, one of which was the Series One contact sheet aligned to it. The result of this process is the presence of the Digital Contact Sheet on SOVA as seen below.
Click the image to visit this site and view the Digital Contact Sheet for Series 1.
This internship was the capstone to my Digital Information Management graduate certificate and I produced a detailed breakdown of my work, including examples of different products in the appendices. It was also a defining moment for me in my graduate work and my professional life as I realized my ultimate goals and experienced archival work from the inside.
This internship was the capstone to my Digital Information Management graduate certificate and I produced a detailed breakdown of my work, including examples of different products in the appendices. It was also a defining moment for me in my graduate work and my professional life as I realized my ultimate goals and experienced archival work from the inside.
A Note On Intellectual Property
All images and digital artifacts (including but not limited to spreadsheets and digital contact sheets) referenced and linked to here are the intellectual property of the Smithsonian Institution and are subject to applicable United States copyright laws.
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