Kempleel blog 5: Galveston, A City Transformed

In the wake of yet another devastating hurricane on the Texas Coast, here's an exhibit chronicling the 1900 Galveston hurricane, its aftermath, and the long term effect on the city's infrastructure. Galveston: A City Transformed would hopefully preserve digitally what storms may destroy physically.

Collection Principles - Although the principles of the exhibit are stated very vaguely, this seems to be an effort to digitize the collections of the Rosenberg Library, containing the Galveston and Texas History Center, located in Galveston. The exhibit was last revised in 2004, and was funded by grants from the IMLS and the TSLA. The websites of the institutions note that they have suffered significant damage from hurricane Ike, so it's unclear what the state of the physical objects might now be.

Object Characteristics - The exhibit contains not only photographs but also manuscripts, letters, oral histories, and transcripts of various official documents. The oral histories are presented only as transcripts, not as sound files. All of the manuscript and photograph images exist as jpegs, the vast majority with one resolution - the readers cannot zoom. The collection is quite large, but its difficult to determine how large, since the organization lacks a central index, and much material is repeated in other ares of the site. There is also no search option, something that is a severe detriment to actual use of the collection.

Metadata - The site is organized into subject collections covering the pre-storm area, various storms in addition to the infamous 1900 hurricane and the construction of the seawall. Each section contains sub-headings which include blurbs describing those things the objects are meant to illustrate, and lists the objects by subject tag. Objects have their own pages which include a reasonable amount of metadata: Accession#, title, Author, description, date, terms etc. Presumably the items are in the collection of the Rosenberg library and the Galveston history center.

Intended Audience - Presumably anyone interested in Galveston and hurricane history, of which there is undoubtedly a growing number of the general public. I imagine the press will be heavy users, especially if the storm trends continue, as there's nothing like the futile juxtaposition of "man vs. nature" then, and "man vs. nature" now.