Speakers: Christine Eisel (History) and William Thompson (World Languages and Literatures)

Dr. Christine Eisel talks about how she used Omeka (Omeka.net), a platform for sharing digital collections, to build an archive of images in a history class and to have students participate in both the building of the archive and the interpretation and classification of the images. Building on archival resources from the special collections in the McWherter Library on the University of Memphis campus, students in her history course worked with primary and secondary sources to build a project based on their analysis of the research. Their collaboration produced a large archive of images with valuable meta-data.

Dr. Will Thompson talks about the abandoned French-speaking town of Old Mines, Missouri, and the website he created for this community using Weebly (Weebly.com). The site features an archive of documents, recordings, and events, which are added to each year. The online archive is community-based and provides a resource for descendants of the inhabitants of Old Mines, even those who no longer live in the area.

Summary and video by Claire Yasmin Khokhar