Digital Humanities: Designing and Managing Digital Archives

Digital collections are essential for preserving and sharing cultural heritage, but building them requires a balance of technical skills and ethical awareness. This text-based course guides you through the foundational concepts of digital curation in the humanities. You will transition from understanding basic digital archiving theory to planning, organizing, and describing your own digital collections. You will gain the confidence to make informed technical and ethical decisions for libraries, museums, or personal research projects. What you'll learn: - Understand the foundational concepts and terminology of digital humanities and archival science. - Plan digitization workflows for various media types while maintaining high preservation standards. - Apply modern metadata schemas like Dublin Core to make collections searchable and organized. - Evaluate ethical considerations, intellectual property, and data sovereignty in digital curation. - Implement basic digital preservation strategies to ensure long-term access to your assets. The course begins with core definitions and the history of digital archives before moving step-by-step through curation workflows, metadata creation, and ethical decision-making. Through clear written explanations and practical exercises, you will learn to structure and describe digital assets effectively. This course is designed for beginners, including students, researchers, librarians, and museum professionals with no prior experience in digital humanities. Start building and preserving your digital collections today.