History.norwescon.org
The history.norwescon.org subdomain is the repository for our digital archives. The goal of this site is to archive as much historical information about Norwescon as we can, including scans of old hardcopy documents, .pdf versions of modern electronic documents, photos of physical artifacts, and any other appropriate information.
Backend
The backend for the site is the open-source Omeka Classic software. Originally developed for use by libraries, museums, and similar organizations, it is well suited for this project.
Administration
There should be at least one "super" user with full administrative rights. Other users may be granted access as contributors, who can add content and edit content they've contributed but cannot make it publicly viewable, or admin users, who can add and edit all content, including making items publicly viewable.
Organization
One collection is defined for each Norwescon event. Individual items are assigned to the appropriate collection.
Collections and items both have a number of descriptive fields based on the Dublin Core metadata set. While not every field will be relevant to every contributed item or collection, it is recommended that as many as possible be completed.
Collections
Collections are used to group related items. For example, all contributions related to Norwescon 40 are part of the Norwescon 40 collection.
Collection information should at least include a title, a brief description including location, Guests of Honor, and attendance when recorded, and the date of the convention.
The list of links to each of the collections at the top of the main page can be edited by the "super" user by editing the theme configuration under the Appearance tab in the top admin menu bar visible when logged in.
Items
Items are individual contributions. The exact items available for each convention's collection vary depending upon what has been available to the archivist.
Item information should at least include a title, the subject (which convention it is for), a brief description of the item, and the date of the item's relevance (the dates of the convention for at-convention items, the date of publication for newsletters, etc.).
Items that are primarily text in nature (newsletters, program books, etc.) should be defined as Item Type: Text and have as much of the source text as possible added to the "Text" field. This allows for the text to be presented directly on the item archive page, so that users can review the text directly without it being "locked" within a source image or .pdf file.
By default, the text field accepts pure text, but it can also accept HTML formatted text. Whenever possible, text from the source items has been either copied or manually retyped and added as HTML formatted text to preserve as much of the original formatting and presentation as possible. The archivist to date has found it easiest to do this by first formatting the text using the Markdown text formatting language and then converting to HTML before pasting it into the text field's HTML editor.
Items may also be given tags such as "badge", "newsletter", or "tshirt" to allow for easy discovery of similar item types across multiple collections.