Description
July 28, 2014 will mark the 100th Anniversary of the beginning of World War I. In its time it was called the Great War; today we call it the First World War. Although the United States did not enter the war until 1917, the conflict made a lasting impact on the culture, economy, and politics of our country.
As organizations, museums, and historic sites from around the world prepare to commemorate the centennial, we have compiled a digital collection of items that express how “home-front” America observed and reacted to World War I.
Metadata
The metadata scheme utilized in this collection is modeled on the Dublin Core metadata schema. Dublin Core was used as a framework due to its ease of use, flexibility, and general accessibility to users. Dublin Core is a good choice for a collection such as this which includes materials in many different formats from books, to audio, video, and digital resources. The relatively small size of the collection does not call for a more complex schema.
Organization Structure
We created our digital library using Weebly, a free web-hosting service which allows users to create their own website or blog using drag-and-drop functions. We made a Home page to introduce ourselves and present a slideshow of images from the collection (a sneak-peak, if you will), and About page for the descriptive essay you are reading now, and a page to house the Collection. Each individual item in our collection is linked to its own webpage from the Collection page. These pages feature the metadata schema, an email of the item, and a short description.
We chose to separate the items by type. The collection has been divided into three categories: books, images, and audio/video media. The items are then ordered alphabetically by title within each section. We chose to arrange the items by title because in this collection, the author/creators are not always easy to determine.
Collection Acquisition and Management
Each group member selected five items for the collection. As mentioned above, we divided the items into three categories. Bryan Ericson chose the books, Rebecca Redinger selected the images, and Michelle Hawkins decided which audio and video material to include.
Bryan was in charge of selecting books for our page. His criteria was simply that the books be about the American home-front in World War I. There were many books on WWI, but a much smaller selection of items about the home front. He also wanted to choose books that received good reviews on Amazon, as well as include a fiction book, in order to offer a little variety. As a fan of alternate historical fiction, Harry Turtledove's The Great War: American Front fit right into our collection. Bryan also wanted a good mix of older books like America in the Great War (1991), and current books like For Home and Country by Celia Malone Kingsbury (2010). He looked by each book in OCLC and obtained their bibliographic records in Dublin Core format and then incorporated them into the pages about each book.
Rebecca began her search for visual material on the Library of Congress's American Memory website. From there, she gathered ideas for other types of visual materials to look for. On almost every digital library website she encountered informative and inspiring World War I prints. The "images" category of our collection could have easily been filled with five such posters, however, that would not have reflected the variety of visual materials available from this time period. Therefore, in addition to the two propaganda posters, she selected a magazine advertisement about the purchase of war bonds, a political cartoon about war-time food production, and a newspaper headline from the day the United States joined the war. The newspaper image was the only item she considered replacing. It should not really be categorized as visual material, yet because it is a specific headline related to our theme, it was chosen for the "images" category. The metadata for each item was re-created using identification information from their original digital collections.
Michelle was responsible for selecting the audio and video material. She started in WorldCat, limiting her search to media items. She specifically looked for items that would give a user of our digital library a feel for life in America during WWI. Michelle chose two music recordings, one of folk songs having to do with the war and home-front life, and one classical music from the era. She also chose a DVD from the History Channel that focused on what life was like for people of the time. Finally, she switched strategies and searched the Library of Congress's digital collections to find a primary source in digital form. This provided the Thriftettes war stamps promotion film. This is a great source because it is an example of an early film and animation, as well as something people of the era would have seen. With all these selected materials, Michelle's aim was to find substantive, culturally relevant information from reputable sources.
Rejected Considerations
One rejected element was the use of MARC. Because we are dealing with a very small collection and are not using a search function, we felt that MARC was not necessary. Originally we had the slideshow and the descriptive essay on the same page, but then we decided to divide them into two pages, Home and About.
Problems Encountered
Weebly was new to two of us in the group, with Rebecca having had some experience with it. Therefore, two of us had to learn the interface. Luckily, it is quite user-friendly. We did have to recreate our About page at one point because for formatting/saving issues. Other than that, things went very smoothly. One of the biggest challenges with a project like this is collaborating asynchronously and managing time effectively. Overall, our group worked very well together.