| Virginia Steel University Librarian University of California, Santa Cruz |
Robin Chandler Project Manager University of California, Santa Cruz |
The University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Libraries, recipient of a 2009 two-year Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant, is building the socially constructed Grateful Dead Archive Online (GDAO) website using Omeka open source software. The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA) represents one of the most significant popular culture collections of the 20th Century and documents the band’s activity and influence in contemporary music from 1965 to 1995.
Donated to the UCSC Library in 2008, the GDA contains over 600 linear feet of material including business records, photographs, posters, fan envelopes, tickets, video, audio (oral histories and interviews) and 3-dimensional objects such as stage props and band merchandise. With the release of GDAO in July 2012, the Archive will actively begin collecting artifacts from an enthusiastic community of Grateful Dead fans.
This presentation will discuss the donation of the collection to UCSC; the challenges of merging a traditional archive with a socially constructed one; rights clearances issues and the intellectual property strategy; crawling and harvesting strategies employed for collecting web resources; plugins and workflows supporting data exchange between CONTENTdm and Omeka; and integrating “the crowd” in the curation of user-submitted content preserved by the California Digital Library’s Merritt repository. Future directions, such as the integration/development of better curation tools and what the Libraries hope to learn from opening the archive to contributions from a large community of fans, will also be discussed.
http://library.ucsc.edu/gratefuldeadarchive/gda-home
http://deadcentral.blogspot.com/
Handout (PDF)
Presentation PDF)