The intention was to post last month but the workload for school has been heavier than expected. The pilot project included in the last post, building an organization’s media archive has been going well. One of the first determinations was that Omeka would not be the platform solution for the project. Omeka is a fine platform, but it is too complex for the organizations environment, personnel, the single media type, and the minimal metadata needs. In this case a simpler PHP/HTML front end for a small database will be more effective and easier to train the organization’s staff on if they decide to continue with the project after the pilot program is completed in December. As of today, the server is built, the platform software (a Linux system with Apache, MariaDB, and PHP [a LAMP server]) is installed, now it’s time to work on the database tables and a simple front end. This will likely be the main daily activity well into October.
In the Local History / Public History class, the next assignment is to analyze an occupation in the field/sub-field of interest, paper conservation was the choice I made as this is an area of great interest to me. Without any local practitioners or local educational resources the decision was made to dive in with a survey of practitioners. The survey is very narrow demographically and geographically, as well as being specific to paper conservation for books and documents, it is limited to the New England area. I would like to relocate to Maine in the near future so the geographic location made sense. Due to the narrow confines imposed, there was a total pool of 115 practitioners invited. As of this writing, there have been 16 respondents, 13.9%, which is pretty good. The hope is to have as close as possible to a 30% response which is asking a lot. Anyone having done a survey by cold-emailing professionals in a field knows anything above 10% is a good response. There are a few more days before the paper needs to be written so we shall see how close I get. The survey has 5 demographic questions and 5 questions on the education of new candidates to the field. SurveyMonkey was used because I have used that tool in the past. The results that have come in have provided an idea for a more detailed research project, an expanded version of this paper, that could make for an interesting journal article. SurveyMonkey is out of the question for an expanded research project, however, they have gotten far more expensive than is practical. Poking around a bit, I found a survey platform that can be added to an existing website and was easy to install and get started. The platform still needs to be explored and learned. This platform could make conducting survey research in a way that fits my workflow and reduces time to process and publish without spending a lot of money for what should be basic feature sets much easier.
Including the two projects above, a collection management system and a research project on paper conservators, there is also a documentary edition project that may move forward. On a recent visit to the local museum, while talking with one of the collections staff about another project for class, they brought up a journal they saw in one of the archive spaces that sounded like it would make a good candidate for a documentary edition for publication. An interest in pursuing this project has been expressed, as of yet no response, however, an in-person follow up will be forthcoming as this would be an enjoyable project and a solid CV / portfolio builder.
Until next time,
~Jon
Edited 21 SEP 2024