My name is Stephanie Surach and I’m earning my MLIS at UW-Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies. I’m very excited to be part of the CDCC 2019 cohort and to have the opportunity to work on digital preservation at the Neville Public Museum of Brown County in Green Bay.
The Neville Public Museum has an extensive collection of objects, still, and moving images, which are used to create engaging exhibits for the community. For this project, I have been focusing on developing an inventory system, digital preservation policy, and storage solutions specifically for the museum’s digital interactive exhibits.
All the digital interactive exhibits are unique and characterized by different levels of complexity, ranging from a digitized or born-digital audio, still, or moving image mediated by a simple interface for the user to begin the interaction, to a composite of digitized and born-digital media to create ultimately a new artifact, to composites of various media that require the user to make choices throughout their interaction, similar to a game or a mobile application.
Needless to say, it can feel a little challenging and overwhelming at times, but I’m always able to talk through the challenges and problem solve with my site supervisor, Louise Pfotenhauer, Collections Manager at NPM, and my mentor, Scott Prater, Digital Library Analyst for the UW Digital Collections Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
It’s exciting to be a part of a digital preservation project that is so future-looking. One of the things I’m looking forward to is to collaborate with the content creators of the digital interactives in the digital preservation workflow. I think this relationship is important and will only lead to the development of better policy and workflows for creating and preserving future exhibits.
The Neville Public Museum of Brown County is an accredited cultural institution that champions history, science, and art. Located in downtown Green Bay, Wisconsin, the museum is dedicated to the collection and preservation of significant objects relevant to Northeast Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The museum seeks to bridge these multi-generational regional communities through engaging exhibits and dynamic programming.
Visit Curating Community Digital Collections for more information about this project. This project is made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, #RE-85-17-0127-17
