We have been thinking through the Catalog part of the grant project and trying to make some decisions to move that part forward. We have been grappling with questions such as how do we want to handle internet resources in the Catalog and what to do about presidential speeches that often appear in multiple places on the internet. How many times do we want “Special Message from President Martin Van Buren” to appear in the Catalog?
We are also thinking through the relationship between the Catalog and the Connecting Presidential Collections website. We originally envisioned the Catalog as a way to identify presidential collections and their hosting organizations so that we could then partner with them and add the collections to CPC. But once we made the first effort to catalog a president’s collections, we were reminded how large and diverse the world of presidential collections is. We identified many interesting presidential resources that might be useful to include in the Catalog that I didn’t think would be appropriate for CPC. I couldn’t quite articulate to my coworkers why some of the resources in the Catalog prototype made me uncomfortable. Useful resources such as videos about the presidents on YouTube might be good to identify in the Catalog but wouldn’t work in my mind in CPC.
After talking through the issues with one of my coworkers, we hit upon a useful way to distinguish between the two parts of this IMLS grant. The Catalog and the CPC website are both focused on presidential collections but in fact their goals are quite unique. The Catalog will be useful to a wider audience if we include most of the presidential resources available, resources such as collections of digitized speeches, educational YouTube videos, and even perhaps lesson plans about the presidents. But CPC has a different mission.
The CPC website is focused on exposing hidden collections of presidential materials. The CPC doesn’t necessarily need to include an internet resource that anyone can easily find through a google search. What we hope to do with CPC is reach out to partner organizations to make their collections more accessible. It doesn’t matter to us if we make them more available by aggregating their metadata into CPC to increase traffic to their website or whether we make them more available by providing training to digitize materials and put them online. The goal is to shed light on valuable historical resources that might be hard to find right now.
This distinction between the two parts of the project was very helpful to me. We can include resources in the Catalog that might make it easier for people to find presidential resources already available on the internet. But CPC’s mission skews in another direction–to focus on the organizations with hidden collections that might need a little assistance in bringing them to light. I am sure that as we continue through our IMLS grant project, I will have many similar revelations that help clarify my thinking about our work. And each time, I will benefit from conversations with my coworkers and others involved in this universe, learning a little more each step of the way.
Connecting Presidential Collections has moved! 