Geneva Henry
Executive Director, Center for Digital Scholarship
Rice University
The Our Americas Archive Partnership project (OAAP) is an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded effort led by Rice University in partnership with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. Conceived as a means of serving scholars in the emerging, multidisciplinary field of American studies, this project is bringing together distributed digital archives of works that will support research into understanding the Americas from a hemispheric perspective rather than that of individual nation states. Now in the second year of a three-year grant, the planned approach for detailed descriptions of the items and assumptions that new partnering archives will host their own digital repositories are raising questions about whether or not the approach will meet the needs of the scholarly community OAAP seeks to serve.
While conforming to best practices in providing standards-based item-level metadata and Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup of texts has generally been embraced by digital projects, it is unclear that this focus on detail will support discovery of new knowledge revealed through new patterns that emerge across aggregated content. Additionally, partnering with Latin American archives may require hosting their content in digital repositories outside the contributing institution, changing assumptions about how unique the descriptions might be. This presentation will describe the OAAP project and explore the challenges it is facing in meeting the American Studies scholars’ needs. Issues that merit reconsideration when doing digital projects such as detailed item-level metadata vs. minimal processing and institution-based repositories vs. hosted repositories will be explored and discussed openly with the audience.