A New Digital Archive for an East Austin Neighborhood: Defining Technical Requirements, Evaluating Unprocessed Collections, and Building a Prototype

This project contributes to the East Austin Digital Archive (EADA), a nascent community archive project hosted by St. Edward's University. I worked with a professor and staff at St. Edward's to define the technical requirements for an Omeka-based digital archive that will be able to accept digital items from the community and display time-stamped multimedia materials overlaid on a web map of the neighborhood. The final deliverables for this project were (1) a working prototype of the digital archive and (2) a comprehensive report detailing how I created the prototype, including technical architecture decisions and data cleaning workflows; why I made the choices I did; and my recommendations for future expansions of the archive. In addition to the work related technical architecture and data cleaning, I created a digital archival version of a tumblr page with 308 gifs created by students at St. Edward's and analyzed the metadata of over 7,000 for inclusion in the archive.