For over 20 years I have belonged to a non-profit organization, The Embroiderer's Guild of America, Inc. “The mission of EGA is to stimulate appreciation for and celebrate the heritage of embroidery by advancing the highest standards of excellence in its practice through education, exhibition, preservation, collection and research.” For at least the last 40 years, the EGA has published a quarterly journal for its membership,
Last year I approached the executive director with the idea to digitize and index an archive of the publication. She and the organization president were very receptive. They suggested I prepare an application for a grant from the organization for the project. When DigIn came along, I felt that waiting until after or during the program would provide the best information and opportunity to plan and execute the project.
It is unlikely that the collection would be accessed by any one except the membership of the organization, but that would be up to the Executive Board to decide. Although subscription to the journal is a benefit of membership, the archive might be determined to be of value to researchers and other similar organizations. The archived collection might be made freely available, or available at an per issue or per article rate.
In each issue of the journal there is a variety of content, including official reports, historical articles, designer/artist profiles, embroidery project instructions, exhibit photo layouts, advertising. Access terms would include these broad article types; the types of embroidery involved; designer/author names; issue date, number, and volume. Learning how to properly index something like this project is perhaps the greatest challenge facing me, as well as determining the best system to use as a repository.
The Shirky essay most certainly prompts a different way of thinking about classification and cataloguing, or tagging. A large portion of my job lately has involved updating our ILS database of authorized Library of Congress subject headings. I found the background illustrations about Yahoo and Google particularly interesting and helpful in understanding how more is less (?).
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