Asian American Arts Centre
Written by Asian American… on Tue, 03/08/2016 – 17:42
Representing community archives in the METRO network, Asian American Arts Centre is interested in expanding the reach of our digital archive of Asian American artists, artasiamerica.org. Our organization is currently pursuing this goal in part through ESDN, which will allow us to promote materials from our digital archive on DPLA.
A METRO fellow would explore how community-based organizations like ours can further increase the discoverability and use of our archives. When we first established our digital archive in 2009, great care was taken to implement the Getty’s controlled vocabularies where possible, while also maintaining a local controlled vocabulary for other terms. In addition, we included ULAN, WorldCat, and Wikipedia references for our artists, if found. While the use of authority control has facilitated internal search and browsing, we would like to leverage this high-quality metadata to allow us to explore new ways of promoting our resources with Linked Open Data.
Our proposal is for a fellow to develop a Linked Data strategy for digital archives maintained by smaller community-based organizations like ours that have a strong commitment to our specific cultural contexts and to the diversity of our historical record, while relying on best archival practices as a means to support knowledge sharing. We would welcome and encourage the participation of other community-based digital archives in the METRO network to provide additional case studies to ensure broad-based applicability.