Wandering Around in the Dark: An Exhibit of Stage Manager Artifacts

Methodology

The items in the collection are from a variety of sources. The items come from NYPL’s Digital Collections, most of them sourced from the Bily Rose Theatre Division at the Library of the Performing Arts. The other institutions include The Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library’s Digital Collections at Yale University, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Digital Collections located in Washington D.C.

I used Omeka S as my template. Omeka S uses Dublin Core as its main schema for its site, so I used that to fill in my resource template fields. I used LCSH and Getty Union List of Arts Names as appropriate and as needed.

Title

A name given to the resource.

dcterms:title

For the title, I went off of what the collecting institution was using and sometimes modified it to fit what I thought was a more abbreviated title. Some of the titles were extremely lengthy, so I thought that a more truncated version would be more appropriate in certain instances.

Description

A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource.

dcterms:description

For the description, I thought that using the metadata that was used by the collecting institution was the right direction to go in. In some instances, I modified the metadata to add more information.

Date

A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource.

dcterms:date

I picked the dates that were the most relevant. If there was a span of years listed, then I put that. But if there was a specific date such as “June 6, 1925” then I decided to go with the more specific date.

Creator

An entity primarily responsible for making the resource.

dcterms:creator

For the creator field, I picked whoever the institution had listed as the creator.

Rights

Information about rights held in and over the resource.

dcterms:rights

For the rights, I went off of the copyright information that was listed in the institution’s record. This guided me to see what the actual rights information is currently.

Subjects

The topic of the resource.

dcterms: subject

The subjects of the item were obvious from the record and from the item itself. I tried to include as many subjects as I thought necessary.

Source

A related resource from which the described resource is derived.

dcterms:source

The source for the item was taken from the institution’s record.

Identifier

An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context.

dcterms:identifier

For the identifier field, I decided to come up with my own identifiers since the identifiers from each of the institutions were varied and not at all standardized across the board. My identifiers were based on the exhibition, the year, the institution, and the type of item.

Exhibition: waitd (wandering around in the dark)

Year: whatever year the item was created, or the best guess

Institution: B (Beinecke), N (NYPL), F (Folger Shakespeare Library), J (Juilliard), VA (Victoria & Albert Museum)

Type of item: repo (report), photo (photograph), print (print), script (script)

Example of full identifier: waitd_1844_B_script

Tags

I used tags both in the item set and for the individual items. The item set has tags “stage manager” and “theater” because those tags apply to all the subjects. Then for individual items, I picked additional tags that were only applicable to those items.