Museum of Houston

Project Name and URL:

Museum of Houston located at http://www.museumofhouston.org/

Organization Name:

Greater Houston Preservation Alliance and Rice University as well as other organizations in the Houston Bay-Area produce this digitization project with the objective of preserving Houston history.

Description of what was Digitized:

Houston area historical documents, photographs, maps, video and audio recordings as well, located in one location; the Museum of Houston. Content is provided by the cities educational and cultural institutions and is from the beginning of the city’s development to modern times.

Audience for the project:

The audience of this project is the public, but more specifically anyone who is interested in detailed Houston history rather than just a broader Texas History that some of the other Texas digitization projects contain. It says on their about page students, researchers, those interested in photography of Houston, and the general public, each with its own description of how they can utilize the site.

Type of Project Background Information Available on Site:

There is not a whole lot of information on the about page about the project itself. It does mention several websites and facilities that currently lend their content to the Museum of Houston for digitization in the repository, but not so much information about the project in great detail. There is a nice section on the technology behind the project which states the project’s scanning standards and image resolution policy which is something I have not noticed in many other projects.

How are the digital assets presented:

The Museum of Houston has a very cool browse section where you can browse the content using a who, what, where, when, and search bars that help narrow searches by those categories or just an overall broad search. Unfortunately there is no refine search, thus making searching for specific content can be hit or miss. Each document, photograph, map, or video comes with its own descriptors that explain some of the basic information about what the patron is viewing.

Metadata Present:

The metadata specifically states that it follows the Dublin Core Metadata standards run by another organization The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, who strives to standardize metadata. The metadata presented in the site are the basics including rights, subject terms, abstract, date created, location, and holding location.

Additional Information:

The site itself is a concise repository in detail, while the content is very hearty containing over four million photographs presented through the Houston Public Library. I appreciate the search uniqueness, with a range that is small enough to actually make several of the choices in the who, what, where, when boxes useful in narrowing a search.