A Warm Welcome, and Exploring the RICHES Neighborhood

Greetings!  I'm Anna Kephart, a student in the University of Central Florida's History MA program (Public History track).  This summer, I'll be completing an internship under Dr. Connie Lester with UCF’s RICHES (Regional Initiative for Collecting the History, Experiences, and Stories of Central Florida) program in order to gain practical experience with creating metadata, transcribing oral histories, evaluating websites, and other aspects of digital archives collections management and outreach.  

RICHES supports a broad range of interdisciplinary public history initiatives through collaborations with universities, nonprofit organizations, businesses, and other institutions in Florida.  Its primary function is to serve as a digital repository for archival materials documenting the history and culture of Florida, with the following goals: "1) to serve as a model for documenting regional history, especially “hidden” history and culture, through an interactive database that draws from multiple repositories and personal collections, and 2) to develop new digital tools for historians" (1).  

I am particularly excited about the opportunity to work with a program that emphasizes "'hidden' history and culture," which means preserving and celebrating the stories and experiences of communities and groups that are under-represented in traditional archival records, such as people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, immigrant populations, and lower-income groups, among others (2).  

My first project will be creating metadata for digitized photographs, correspondence, postcards, clippings, and other materials in the Weeki Wachee Collection.  You may be thinking, “what a wild name”—if so, stay to tuned for next week’s update to find more! Here’s a sneak preview... (3)


"Metadata" is often defined as "data about data," which I find to be a fairly opaque explanation.  Essentially, it is a series of attributes that can be combined to provide a full set of background, contextual, and technical information about a digital item.  For instance, in the case of the photograph above, you might want to know: 
  • What is going on in this photo?  
  • Where and when was it taken?  
  • Who is the woman?  
  • Why is she holding a large report card?
  • Who was the photographer?  
  • What kind of photo process did he or she use to develop the photograph?  
  • Why was the photo taken--was it taken for a specific purpose or event?  
  • Where could I find the original, physical version of the photo?  
  • When and by whom was it scanned?  
  • What settings did the scanning technician use to scan the image (e.g. is it at a high enough resolution for me to reprint it in a book if I wanted to?)  
The answer to each of these questions is one piece of metadata.  I will be creating this metadata using a set of standards called Dublin Core, which I will detail further in future posts.  In addition to creating metadata, I also look forward to transcribing oral history interviews, testing the new RICHES site before it goes live later this summer, and documenting RICHES' transition process as it upgrades to the newest version of Omeka, its digital asset management system.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to carry out this internship remotely despite the unexpected intrusion of COVID-19.  While I will miss having the chance to interact with and shadow Dr. Lester and RICHES Program Assistant Geoff Cravero in-person, I am delighted that they were willing to be flexible and creative in order to welcome me aboard remotely!

(1) "RICHES Mosaic Interface," University of Central Florida, https://riches.cah.ucf.edu/.

(2) Brian Keough, "Documenting Diversity: Developing Special Collections of Underdocumented Groups," Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services 26 (2002): 241-251, http://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/ulib_fac_scholar/34.

(3) Elmer "Sparky"Schumacher, "Weeki Wachee Mermaid with Report Card," RICHES of Central Florida, https://richesmi.cah.ucf.edu/omeka/items/show/10477.

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