New Challenge
Thanks for the help from Josh and Lauren, the official ID archive is set up and ready to go. you can find it on http://cdm.uarts.edu/ (campus network only). So far we’ve overcome the technical issues to set up an archive system, but we are facing another challenge. We have hundreds of gigs of files from previous school years and many more physical objects like slides, models, posters, and sketches. The Challenge is what we should keep as an official ID archive and what we should get rid of. There is really no parameter in this matter. According to definition, an archive is a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution or group of people. These documents should be selected primary source collected over the course of time. As for our ID archive, we wish to keep a collection of student works in all courses over time. Only those worth documented should be preserved in the archive. As a graduate student working on archiving for assistantship project, I may not know everything about past student projects, needless to say that I have to fill out all fields for each files. Therefore, An efficient way to select works to be in the collection as well as getting all information for the fields is essential to this project.
Our preliminary decision after last meeting was to upload the best 10 works in each course starting from last semester/ year (fall 09) as the first step. We hope to ask each faculty member to pick out the best 10′s and fill out all information about them. The way we wanted to do is that before next faculty meeting (TBD by Tony), we will go over and upload a couple of projects that we’ve involved in last semester. At the faculty meeting, we will show these files through cdm ID collection for demo and explain how it works to the faculty. If they all agree with the plan, we will be giving each of them a thumb drive with the works of the courses they were teaching and asking them to select the best 10. There will also be a template PDF for the fields they have to fill out for each of the projects. Once they return the thumb drive, we can upload those files as the first batch for official ID collection. If the best 10 works out well, in the future we will be collecting student works based on this method.
