Summer Projects for MARA Students

MARA Blog

Published: July 27, 2016 by Anna Maloney

Whether you have a box full of photographs from past family vacations or a smartphone picture album of your most recent weekend getaway, there are many free tools to help you manage your digital assets.

After my grandmother passed away in 2009, my father (pictured above in a ca. 1965 photo) had her numerous photo albums digitized and distributed copies of the images on a flash drive. Over the next month, I hope to catalog and describe the images, and backup the files in cloud storage.

Although MARA classes aren’t currently offered during the summer semester, students can stay academically engaged by keeping current with trends in archives and records management and hone their professional skills by initiating their own personal information projects.

Whether you have a box full of photographs from past family vacations or a smartphone picture album of your most recent weekend getaway, there are many free tools to help you manage your own digital assets.

For example, in the INFO 282 – Digital Assets Management course, students are introduced to metadata and taxonomy design via Flickr. Google Photos is another option that provides similar functionality and can be synced with your Google account. But remember to do your research—Google Photos is a relatively new service, replacing Google’s original photo management software, Picasa. Google Photos automatically migrated the photos of Picasa users, but other companies may not have the resources to continuously support users’ data.

If you prefer not to use a cloud-based service, the picture applications standard on many operating systems import technical metadata during uploading and allow users to organize and tag pictures for enhanced searchability.

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