Blog Post 7: Curation Team Planning

 My team is working with Maine Mill Museum to collect digital media in order to memorialize the Lewiston shooting that took place in October last year. The Maine Mill Museum wants my group to focus on print media and videos. As our group consists of seven members, we decided to split up into two groups: one that focused on print works and the other on video media. Together we agreed that print media would most likely need more members to focus on it. Therefore, myself, Kayleigh, Kira and Emma will work on collecting articles we find online. Meanwhile, Robby, Josie, and Julia will be working on finding and screen recording videos of news reports and late night talk shows. Together, we will compile these findings on a google sheet that was originally started by the curation team from last year. In this sheet we will number each item, list the title, the author/creator, a link to the pdf, keywords for an easier search, a description of the contents, and what form of media it is. After finding an article and putting it in the google sheet, I then must take screen shots of each image showcased in the article and provide the metadata on it in the sheet as well. 

I believe that the Maine Mill Museum project that I am working on should be categorized as a digital memorial. During our meeting, the women working with us kept repeating the importance of this work that we are doing. As time passes, stories that covered the events of the shooting are starting to disappear from the web. Therefore, our job is to try to preserve these articles so that people are able to learn about the event that drastically affected the Lewiston community years later. When things begin to stop being covered by the news, stories begin to disappear. The work we are doing guarantees that the victims and their stories will never be forgotten. Our materials have already been digitized as we are looking for articles and videos that have already been uploaded onto the web. As a result, our job requires one less step then the other groups. However, half of our battle is simply finding articles that aid our cause that haven't already been found by other members of our group or the group that worked on this project before us. After meeting with our client, they have told us to focus on big media sources like the New York Times or CBS News. I believe that this will provide more insight for the audience on how the nation was affected by the events in Lewiston. Overall, I hope to provide the client with more materials to put towards memorializing the shooting and its victims as I understand the weight of what we are doing for the Lewiston community.