Organization
Organizing your materials is a crucial but often ignored step in preparing your materials for the archive. Skipping this step can lead to a lot of headaches later in the process.
Spending time to organize your materials can help you understand what you have, in depth. Identifying major themes, subjects and trends in your collection is an important part of shaping the story you want to tell, and may not be obvious at first glance.
These insights are invaluable when cataloging your material and composing your metadata.
Manitos Community Memory Project research associate, Adrienne Rosenberg, has put together a workflow guide that covers Organization, Digitization and Adding To The Archive.
This section of The Workflow covers Organization.
In addition, Amy Winter at UNM created a handbook for the Manitos Community Memory Project ‘Training the Trainers’ workshop, Augsut 12-14, 2019. The handbook provides a good overview of working with digital images and metadata practices.
The ‘Training the Trainers’ workshop was sponsored by the New Mexico Humanities Council.
Now that you’ve organized your material, if it is already digitized by virtue of your Field Collection process, proceed to Adding to the Archive.
If your materials are still in hardcopy form, move on to the Digitization section.