Indian River State College Libraries maintains both a physical archive and online Digital and Archival Collections.
The physical archive is inside the Miley Library on Indian River State College's Massey Campus in Ft. Pierce. The archive includes institutional artifacts like yearbooks, newspaper clippings, college catalogs, awards, graduation booklets, faculty dissertations, and other documents and ephemera created by or about the College. We also have the Treasure Coast Newspapers Collection in the physical archive. This collection consists of about 1,200 large bound books of daily and weekly newspaper editions. They date back to the early 1900s and include editions of the St. Lucie County Tribune, The Stuart News, and the St. Lucie/Fort Pierce News Tribune.
The Digital and Archival Collections include institutional archival and local cultural heritage artifacts digitized and described by Indian River State College Librarians. Indian River State College Libraries' Digital Collections is housed online in our instance of Islandora, an open-source digital repository or digital asset management system. The Islandora platform is made available to Indian River State College (and the rest of Florida's Colleges and Universities) by the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC). FLVC is the statewide library consortium for Florida Colleges and Universities. View our Digital Collections here.
Student volunteers will describe a real local cultural heritage artifact by creating its descriptive metadata. The artifacts have already been digitized and are ready for you to describe, so that they can be added to Islandora for scholars anywhere in the world to access. This real-world volunteer work gives you the opportunity to learn about local history while understanding how online sources are titled, described, and made accessible via keyword searching.
The local cultural heritage organization, the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation, and librarian Angie Neely-Sardon are engaged in a preservation project. Laura (Riding) Jackson was a local poet who operated an orange grove in Wabasso with her husband, where they lived in a "Cracker-style" home built over 100 years ago. The Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation is charged with preserving her home and her legacy while also providing writing and literary programming for people of all ages in our community. The Foundation itself has over 40 years of content it has created, as well as many of Jackson's writings and personal belongings (in addition to her home). Additional completed and in progress preservation projects include The Chronicle and Jean Ellen Wilson's oral histories of St. Lucie County residents.
Angie Neely-Sardon and her federal work-study student worker are digitizing all artifacts delivered by the Foundation in the Brackett Preservation Lab. The Brackett Preservation Lab, or BPL, is a self-service space providing equipment and software for library users to digitize their analog and print memorabilia. The lab provides equipment for digitizing VHS, DVD, Hi8, and Mini DV home movies and scanning photographs, negatives, slides, yearbooks, scrapbooks, and more. We am using this equipment to digitize the Foundation's artifacts. The next step is to describe them in detail using the metadata schema accepted by Islandora, the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS).
MODS, which is short for Metadata Object Description Schema, is the metadata schema used by Indian River State College Libraries for our Digital and Archival Collections. stored in the open-source software digital repository system, Islandora. In the metadata lesson (above), we discussed the necessity to standardize the terms we use to describe artifacts. This is accomplished by using metadata schemas and enforcing authority control.
A metadata schema is a framework used to organize and describe information about data. There are many different types and formats of data. Traditional libraries are filled with discrete physical items, namely books. The most common metadata schema used by libraries to describe books is MARC 21. MARC 21 includes required metadata fields such as title, author, publisher, and format.
MODS is another metadata schema. It was created by the Library of Congress and is based on MARC 21. MODS is easier for humans to read and understand because it uses natural language tags rather than numbers, like MARC 21.
The top-level elements for the MODS framework are:
Some MODS fields are required, while some are optional. Some are repeatable, while others can only have one value. Each library or institution uses MODS a little differently by including or omitting elements based on their needs and the kinds of artifacts they are collecting. Here you can read Indian River State College Libraries' Metadata Application Profile, which details the guidelines for using MODS at our institution.
Indian River State College Libraries has Digital and Archival Collections. The open-source platform Islandora is used to preserve and provide access to College, student, and community artifacts of historical and scholarly value that have been digitized and ingested into these digital collections. Indian River State College Libraries is partnering with the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation to digitize the 40+ years of artifacts they have collected related to the poet and things the Foundation has created to support and foster literary interests and writing in our community. The most relevant and valuable artifacts will be ingested into Islandora and will be searchable and viewable inside our Digital and Archival Collections online.
Your role for this volunteer project is to inspect a digitized artifact. You will receive links to scans of unique artifacts to describe.
Search and read about the contents of the artifact online to learn more about the artifact and its context. You will likely need to look up related information. For example, some artifacts are newspaper clippings from the 1990s. You should search for the name of the newspaper to find out where it was published. Use the digital file of the artifact and the information you find online to describe it so that others can find it by searching for keywords. Provide enough information so that anybody who sees the file online can understand its historical and cultural significance.
Enter the values for the metadata elements in this form: https://forms.gle/rY2bBSUWXnYUZUtk6. Completing this form is how you will submit the metadata values so the librarians can use your descriptions to put the artifacts online in our digital collections.
The form includes explanations and links to controlled vocabularies. The Subject(s) field is repeatable and uses authority control via the Library of Congress Subject Headings controlled vocabulary. Determine what the artifact is about, including where (location, i.e., Florida -- Fort Pierce) and what it is about (the topic, i.e., Segregation). Search the Library of Congress Authorities for the standardized Subject Headings to apply.
Use the metadata lesson and links on this page to create or select the metadata values to describe your artifact. There is a note field within the form in case you run into issues (such as incomplete or nonexistent metadata for required fields) and need a place to communicate that.
Are you interested in volunteering to help the Indian River State College Librarians digitize and/or describe local historical artifacts?
Fill out the volunteer interest form here.
Confirmed volunteers can log their hours using the PDF Volunteer Log form linked below.
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