Disability Arts Culture
Sophia Bogle, Sydney Burke, Susan Hughes, 2021 Showcase
Disability Arts Culture: The purpose of the project was to archive websites on Disability Arts Culture using the online service, Archive-It. The group archived websites and created descriptive metadata to make content searchable in the Wayback Machine. We assigned scope rules to address rendering and preservation issues encountered in the websites. The narrative paper and video presentation show our process in curating a digital collection. The process involved selecting a theme and a group of sites, learning to navigate and run crawls on Archive-It (a web archiving service), troubleshooting functionality, rendering and interoperability issues with a focus on extensions and file types, and then creating a production crawl to permanently archive our collection with both collection and item-level metadata. Deciding what will be culturally relevant in the future was challenging, but we decided to choose cultural elements that are under-represented. Archival justice demands that efforts like this be made. The Disability Arts Culture collection can be viewed at https://archive-it.org/collections/17564.
After a long independent career restoring rare books, Sophia Bogle is pivoting her career to work with special collections with an understanding that digital assets play a large role in making collections more accessible.
Sydney Burke: “I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Arts from San Francisco State University. After I graduated, I was a program coordinator for a research project that taught art inside state prisons. I developed art workshops for individuals experiencing incarceration and managed the headquarters office. One of my significant responsibilities was to care for and catalog artworks created inside prison. This was challenging because many of the artworks had obscure or nonexistent metadata, so I had to make sense of them and create some organization. I decided to organize the artworks by prison, what I now know of as arranging by provenance. This was the pivotal moment when I decided that I wanted to be an archivist. When I started this academic journey in Fall 2020, I only considered myself an office administrator and artist. After finishing this program in Fall 2021, I can proudly say that I am a competent information professional!”
Susan Hughes grew up in Annapolis, MD, attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, and then worked with SITI, a teaching and touring repertory theater company, in New York for a decade. She currently resides in Alameda and keeps busy with her two teenage daughters. Susan received her teaching credential from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and has been teaching high school English for the last few years. She will be completing her Digital Assets Certificate in the Spring 2022 semester and pursuing a career in data and metadata upon graduation in December 2022.