Geoff Willard Blog #3: Women in Broadcasting History

This digital exhibit is courtesy of the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland. National Public Radio stores the bulk of their archival reels here, so I initially assumed the exhibit might showcase some of the women that helped found the organization back in the early 1970s, until I saw that the collection's focus was on mid-20th century women. Whoops. Nevertheless, the information they do have is engaging enough that were I a broadcast scholar, I would want to check out the physical collection. 

Collection Principles 

Insofar as the overall scope of the project, I understand the rational behind the 16 women chosen - they're women who worked in broadcasting during the mid-20th century. Got it. Beyond that, I'm lost. What other women can I expect to find in the physical collection? What is representative about these 16 women? What are the copyright restrictions on their images? Why does 'tour the gallery' bring me to a random image? I do like that the collection source is mentioned for each gallery, along with a brief summation of its contents and donation date. Clicking on the source brings up a thorough archival record with a biography of the donor, scope and content notes, and series descriptions.

All of the scanned images are crystal clear - unless you use a screen reader. Nothing is transcribed, best as I can tell, so while a user would hear the library's added historical notes, the text on the actual image would be effectively hidden.

Object Characteristics

To the library's credit, the notes they have added to all of the images provide crucial origin and developmental history information. Everything is a .jpg with an idiosyncratic naming scheme. Names begin with the initials of the featured women (i.e. all Lee Lawrence .jpgs begin with LL-), but then the scheme becomes haphazard with endings like 'photo1.jpg, corr3.jpg, gar5.jpg.' Some of those endings are relatively descriptive - gar5 is the 5th Dave Garroway clipping - but photo1 is just plain lazy. Image DPI is 72 pixels/inch. Scanning hardware is unknown.

Metadata

There's very little in the way of metadata here. Perhaps the lack of a search interface influenced this decision. Aside from the bare minimum of administrative data (dimensions, color space), and the lump of text that stands in for descriptive metadata, there's not much to see on the front end.

Intended Audience

My guess would be potential researchers interested in broadcasting history. Hook them in with a representative sample from a much larger collection, get them to visit/do research, and increase the library's usage metrics in the process. Sounds like a good plan. There's not enough context in the exhibit to give the casual visitor reason to stay.