Creating Discovery in Student-Led Digital Humanities Projects: A Case Study

We will present a case study that explains the metadata challenges in one Brown University Library student-led project, Opening the Archives, and the keyword strategy that we designed to make the project discoverable by its intended audience. Emma Wilson and Mary Alexander argue that exposing metadata work is "the heartbeat making DH projects usable, robust, preservable, sustainable, and scalable,” but there are few examples of how student-led DH work has done so. Our metadata strategy includes collecting past keywords in the database, analyzing word frequency, and developing broad keywords to describe the documents in the database.

Outcomes: Learn how to develop a keyword strategy * Learn about the metadata challenges and successes of one student-led DH project