Creating Digital Theatre Archives
Best Practices
These practices are aimed at individuals and organizations interested in setting up digital, public theatre archives online.
- Use metadata standards. Metadata standards are vital to ensure that materials in an archive can be easily found. They also help design a plan for migrating records when storage technologies and user interfaces change. At the very minimum, you should include Dublin Core metadata (more about how to do this below).
- Develop a sustainability pathway. Uploading material to a website is a good way to ensure that many people have access to a collection. But what will happen to it in 10 or 50 years from now? Below we offer a list of places that are reasonably stable homes for your collections. But a more robust sustainability strategy requires a strategic partnership with a university or national archive so that in due course the collections can be managed within a custodial setting (that is, an institution with the manpower and technical expertise to keep the records perpetually).
- Include explicit descriptions of how the collections where made. Make sure that all relevant information about how records where selected, what things are excluded and how the records were made is explicit in the site. No archive can be fully neutral and it is important for users of the archive to understand the perspective of the people who made the archives and put the records together.
- Obtain intellectual property rights. Make sure that you acquire the rights to the documents in the archive and that the performers (and other holders of the property rights) agree to deposit their material in the archive. There are many ways to enable the materials in the archive to be reused and this must also be explicitly communicated in the archive. Our suggestion is to use creative commons.
- Enable a multiplicity of uses. Useful archives need to be used by many people for many different purposes. Think of making archives that don't privilege a particular interpretation but favor a multiplicity of perspectives.
Platforms
- Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its five-minute setup makes launching an online archive or exhibition as easy as launching a blog. This platform is designed for cultural institutions and comes with Dublin Core support out of the box.
- WordPress is the most common platform for blogs. It is very easy to use and manage. If you want to use this for an online digital archive, make sure you use the Dublin Core plugin. You can also try the custom type plugin and the [custom fields plugin] https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/ to make your site work less like a blog and turn it into a general-purpose CMS (content management system).