If You Give a Girl a Website (She'll ask for metadata searching)
When non-library platforms want to integrate online archival materials into their project, they often turn to pre-made web content management systems to lessen the need for advanced coding and metadata skills. This was the case for Windows to the World (W2W), a digital humanities curriculum platform that uses material from several different archival repositories. The W2W website, which was designed by university WCMS developers, has very limited metadata functionalities for featured museum items and no metadata for the curricula. For a platform that aims to make creative educational connections between otherwise disparate primary sources, this has become a crushing problem. However, a new grant- and a young MLS student learning to code- offer the chance to change that. This talk showcases one MLS student’s efforts to transition a non-functional WCMS into a platform where metadata drives educational engagement. Using a combination of library science pedagogy, inter-institutional collaborations, and some hot-off-the-press skills in GitHub CollectionBuilder and HTML, this grad student explores how librarians can reframe educators’ understanding of archival materials when they prioritize the metadata around each item.