The process for creating a bibliography for the Sustaining Medart project began with looking at a mashup of keywords and themes from the grant application of the project, and of course discussions in the Visual Media Workshop with Aisling Quigley, and having been involved in the interviews that we carried out for the project at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI. Websites, PDFs, and journal articles worked themselves out of the woodwork as I searched for terms such as “preserving websites”, “digital preservation policy”, “website usability”, “digital collections”, “digital galleries”, “online museums”, “digital image collection users”, “grounded theory”, “qualitative coding”, “coding interviews”, “analyzing interviews”, “1990s websites”, and more. Eventually I had to figure out how to make sense of it all; how to put all of these resources in a logical order.
The major themes that I found throughout the articles, which turned into categories and sub-categories within the bibliography, include the following: Usability, with the sub-categories Aesthetics and another for Metadata, User Perspective; Image Databases and Collections, with the sub-category of Issues in the 1990s; Preservation and Access, with the sub-categories of Images, Websites, Policy/Policy Development, and Project Management; and Grounded Theory, with the sub-category of Coding and Analyzing Interviews.
Usability was an obvious one. While carrying out the interviews, the biggest aspect we focused on was testing how usable people found the website; whether they could intuitively find what was asked of them to find. Regardless of opinion, the task that they had to complete was more about the logical navigation of the website. The resources that I gathered for this section and its subsections include articles and books on the functionality of digital materials for research in the humanities, how individuals experience and react to digital archives and museums, how viewers react to the quality of images, and the user perspective, interaction, and understanding of metadata found in digital image collections. I’ve invested a lot of time in the Usability section due to its prominence within the interview process.
The second section that I’ve spent the most time on thus far is Preservation and Access. When searching for articles and trying to find relevant sources for Sustaining MedArt, the majority fell into the category of preservation policy and scholarly advice on how to develop that policy. With any digital preservation project, developing a preservation policy is very important, especially if new individuals become involved later down the road. The sub-category for Websites contains some important case studies for website preservation, including a case study on preserving the Lighthouses of Australia website, and a reference to preserving two HTML exhibition websites created by the MoMA.
My thinking behind placing Coding and Analyzing Interviews as a sub-category of Grounded Theory is that coding and analyzing interviews, which are qualitative and opinion-based in nature, fall under Grounded Theory as a research model. Grounded Theory as a larger category is one that I still have to do some further reading on in order to add to the category within the bibliography.
*Mind-map made using Coggle