The Digital Drawer: A Crowd-Sourced, Curated, Digital Archive Preserving History and Memory

FAIN: HAA-261266-18

Georgia Tech Research Corporation (Atlanta, GA 30318-6395)
Scott Robertson (Project Director: January 2018 to March 2022)
Jesse P. Karlsberg (Co Project Director: June 2018 to March 2022)

Participating institutions:
Georgia Tech Research Corporation (Atlanta, GA) - Applicant/Recipient
Emory University (Atlanta, GA) - Participating Institution

The development and testing of the Digital Drawer project on digitized community archives for rural Georgia audiences. The project partners include the Historic Rural Churches of Georgia and Emory University.

The Digital Drawer is a collaborative partnership among Georgia Tech, Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) and the Historic Rural Churches of Georgia (HRCGA) to pilot a method of gathering, curating and disseminating crowd-sourced community memory. This effort of the state library system, universities, humanities and non-profit organizations is testing an online concept through a program permitting Georgians to upload their carefully preserved documents, photographs, images of artifacts, and oral memories of historic churches that were the foundation of their community life. The project seeks to develop and pilot a cloud-hosted media and metadata repository and public-facing web application for submitting content to the archive. The Digital Drawer will be designed to accommodate the limited technical capacity of an anticipated older demographic with disabilities.

Associated Products

The Digital Drawer: A Crowd-Sourced, Curated, Digital Archive Preserving History and Memory (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Digital Drawer: A Crowd-Sourced, Curated, Digital Archive Preserving History and Memory
Author: Scott Robertson
Author: Laura Levy
Author: Amelia Lambeth
Author: Jesse P. Karlsberg
Abstract: While many digital asset management platforms and digital libraries exist, most have been designed for technically savvy users and not the older adults who are a key audience for our Digital Drawer platform. In the domain of digital humanities collections, our project is significant in that we are utilizing a participatory design (PD) process wherein all of the stakeholders and potential users of a system are actively involved in the design process to help insure the result meets their needs and is usable. This paper presents a case study on the PD process and the challenges of designing a crowd-sourced media and metadata submission tool for the Historic Rural Churches of Georgia to accommodate older adult users with low technical savvy and disabilities. We report on the PD process to design the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) for this user demographic, present conclusions and plans for future work.
Date: 07/26/2019
Primary URL: http://2019.hci.international
Primary URL Description: Paper to be published July, 2019. The URL provided is the main conference URL.
Conference Name: 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

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