Jessi Fishman Blog 2: Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution

Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution is an online exhibit curated by the Jewish Women's Archive to preserve the story of Jewish women and the feminist revolution. The creators of this actually beautiful and really user-friendly site chose to design an exhibit in which the agents of historical change—the activists themselves—would tell the story and contribute the majority of the resources. This blog entry unfortunately will not have pictures from the site, as the whole thing is done in Flash, and therefore will not let you save any of the images. I encourage, you, however, to check out the site, if only to see an example of something that can be a well-done site with a lot of negative aspects as far as online collections are concerned.

Collection Principles
This site has definitely been created with an explicit development policy in mind, i.e. contributions of Jewish feminist activists of historically significant objects from their personal collections, along with short statements about the objects' significance. The site itself is extremely easy to maneuver, and you never get lost because the top of the page will always tell you where you are and how to get back to the main site. The bottom of the main page includes links to resources the site utilized, possible lesson plans related to the collection, a Terms of Use page, an About the Exhibit page, and ways to contact the curators.

The way the site is laid out is definitely user-friendly, and allows the user to examine the collection in a variety of ways. You can choose from a Timeline section, complete with listings of important events with regard to Jewish women and the Feminist movement, including links to both outside information (for example, blurbs of important events allow you to click on names such as "Betty Friedan" and "Equal Rights Amendment" and be taken to relevant sources of information) and also to links within the site. For example, each phase of the timeline is complete with small photos of links to objects that have been digitized specifically for the site, like videos and books. You may not have found these objects, for instance, if you were only browsing through the "Themes" part of the site.

The Themes include such subjects as "Setting the Feminist Agenda" and "Confronting Power". They all have a concise description when clicked on, and then a page of links to objects that the curators and the contributors saw as fitting for these themes. You can also search the collection by person, format, topic, date, and keyword.

Object Characteristics
As stated before, these objects have been digitized to appear in the site as Adobe Flash, which can not be downloaded or saved. This is probably a face-saving attempt of the site curators to not get anything stolen from the archive, but leads to a few problems with the site. For one, Adobe Flash may not be a permanent format, and if Adobe should go under, all of this work may be lost. There is also no information whatsoever about how the items were actually digitized, or the workflow involved. This means that the user knows nothing about the naming conventions, permanent location, origins or developmental history of the items. The original format can be discovered, but only by going to the Search function and then choosing "by format". When you click on any object in the site, with the exception of videos, which start playing, it is impossible to tell what the original item was to begin with unless, in some cases, you read the entire corresponding information and biography of the contributor.

Metadata
As you can probably infer from the lack of information regarding the digital objects as stated above, there is virtually NO metadata on this web site! Now clearly, the curators of this site must have attached metadata to the objects, otherwise a search function would not be available at all. But they make no effort whatsoever to allow the user to see any of the "behind the scenes" work that went into the creation of this online collection. When you click on an object, it will sometimes tell you what the digital picture is of, such as a pin or a book cover, but no other metadata (besides the contributor's personal story behind the item) is made available either right there, or anywhere else in the site. In the About the Site section, it is stated that they are not going to be adding anything to this particular online exhibit, so that could have something to do with the lack of information they want to give out, but in the long run that really doesn't give a secure feeling to the life span of this site or their digitized items and work done.

Intended Audience
Clearly this site was not made for picky library students looking for the top digitization efforts in our field out there today, i.e., me. It was, however, pretty well made for my mom. She would absolutely flip over this site, and probably will when I send her the link. I think the intended audience for this site is regular people. Jewish women, for one, especially those with a high level of interest in Judaism, Feminism, and the combination of the two. But not scholars...unless they are scholars in personal histories behind objects relating to the Jewish Women aspect of the Feminist Revolution, and don't care too much about where the objects really came from or saving them to look at them again. The site is pretty, and well-organized, and easy to find your way around. But as an online collection, it is seriously lacking in a lot of ways.