Managing a Digital Public History Project: The History and Culture Access Consortium Project

The poster “Managing a Digital Public History Project: The History and Culture Access Consortium Project (HCAC)” describes and visualizes two graduate research assistants' experience in managing a digital history project. The HCAC project, funded by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, seeks to make collections from five Historically Black Universities digitally accessible to the public on the Omeka S platform by 2025. As Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media digital history fellows at George Mason University, our primary job is to train project managers in the Omeka S platform. However, our roles do not stop there. Given the large scope and timeline of the project, we have also helped in assessing each institutions’ collections, discussed the challenges and plans to digitize those collections, helped with metadata description, and conducted in person visits to each institution. We have also recently engaged in “metadata management” which is showcased in the primary panel on the poster. In metadata management, we have essentially facilitated strategy sessions with the project managers about developing shared “resource templates'' in Omeka S, which will help provide digital cross-walks between the different source types of each collection amongst and between each institution. Metadata management also includes helping establish Omeka S “item sets'” amongst the cohort of project managers at each institution, which will connect most of the institutional collections to each other thematically. Throughout this entire process, we have worked with a number of partners from diverse levels of management. The poster introduces the overall project’s goals and timelines, our specific roles on the DH development team, and the functionality of using Omeka S for this project. It also displays examples. It captures a dynamic digital public history project in its early stages, and models to other PhD history students how to manage a large-scale multi-institutional public history project.