As a graduate student at the University of North Carolina in the School of Information & Library Science, one of my interests is the digital preservation of cultural information, as a means to provide access and increase the lifespan of information. This project seeks to apply much of what I have learned, through practical experience and classroom instruction, and is a final project for a Spring 2004 Digital Preservation and Access course (INLS 244 ).

We were directed to select 15 items of our own to build a digital exhibit around objects with a common theme, and of various formats, with the intention to encounter content and digitization challenges. The items we were asked to include were photos, newspaper or print materials, and handwritten documents. As we digitized each item, we kept detailed notes about the procedures and methods for creating the digital objects, including the type of scanning hardware and software, image manipulation software, as well as features of the digital "master". While digital master was of superior quality, the file size was incredibly large for each item. Thus, digital derivatives of these masters are featured on this site, to enable faster download and access. Please be aware that the time gained in the download process is a tradeoff for the loss of detail and quality in each of the images.

The digital exhibit project for INLS 244 is quite detailed and demanded the documentation of several metadata elements such as Dublin Core metadata for the exhibit as a whole and exhibit level Dublin Core preservation metadata for each of the images. Read more about this project by accessing the INLS 244 assignment.