This week saw the first actual visit to the Jones High Museum. Though our time there was fairly brief we were able to dive into the archives as well as the formation of an organizational structure and the beginnings of a archived list of artifacts at the museum. Currently the archived list includes columns with identifying features such as the name of the artifact, a given ID number, as well as a collection designation, space for the identification of dates or date ranges related to the artifact, and additional data which can hopefully be translated to provide a level of metadata. This allows for the creation of online archives or the inclusion of this archive into resources which are already up and running within the University of Central Florida such as RICHES. At the moment all the information pertaining to the Jones High Museum Internship is located in online repositories which are backed up through the cloud. Although this information is expected to be published online for the general public it is set to private views in the current state as the project is still in progress an is largely incomplete.
If anybody wishes to see the data archived the storage format currently being used by the internship team is the Google family of business tools such as the Drive, our archive currently resides on the Google Sheets program, while the key for the identification of collection locations is formatted in the Google Docs program. As the project is part of an ongoing body of work by the students, the material regarding the internship is housed in a Google account which is dedicated to the “Marching Forward” documentary project. This account provides a stable platform which not only houses the files but also makes such files available to the individuals who would find this information useful even in the unfinished state. The use of Google and the cloud based storage and functionality can be perfectly tailored for use in public history as the suite of business tools akin to Microsoft Word provides the resources needed to produce high quality work which can be duplicated and edited. This provides for both the dissemination as well as professionalism needed by a field which requires the production of history related documents as well as conveying such work to a community which is heavily invested in the history being presented. The platform also enables the ability to add new viewers and editors on the fly, as well as an easily maintained calendar and address book which allows for the coordination of a schedule and contacts at the museum for the team members involved.
In addition to the trip to the Jones High History Museum I continued my work in the creation of a comprehensive history of Jones High, as well as attended meetings both with the supervisor to the project Dr. Cassanello and Dr. Lester. The meeting with Dr. Lester provided valuable insight into the philosophy of archiving material allowing for the information needed to format an approach to archiving the museum.
Jones High Museum Internship - Kyle Aulow 