Archiving historical documents, including images is an important task. The Greater North Miami Historical Society had a collection of images that needed proper archiving so they can be appreciated for the stories they hold. This interesting news came to us from Florida International University News in their article, “Digital Collections Breathes New Life Into Old History.”
Founded in 1997, the society works to preserve the history of North Miami and the surrounding areas, spanning Aventura, Biscayne Park, Miami Shores, North Miami and North Miami Beach. Its historical collection dates back to the 1930s and includes over 4,000 negatives, photographs and other items.
The process of digitization can be very time-consuming. It includes not just scanning documents and uploading them to a server but also creating metadata – data that describes other data. Properly applied metadata enables documents and photos to become a searchable database of information.
Without metadata, it would take a long time to find any particular item in the collection, and much of the context of the image would be lost forever.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
