I decided to base my archive on Loyola News, the previous name of the Loyola Phoenix student newspaper. My motivation for this choice stemmed from the fact that I wanted to work on a student publication. Our team’s grant proposal project is based on the Mundelein student newspaper ‘The Skyscraper.’ A student newspaper becomes a space where students can debate, learn about the larger world, and develop critical thinking. I believe that the Loyola Phoenix offers insights into the thoughts and concerns of the current cohort of Loyola students. Universities are transitional places; students study here, form intense bonds with friends and spaces, and ultimately will leave this place. Student newspapers are capsules in time that capture the topics that interest the student body, and they are the one of the spaces where students can express themselves freely. This is why I created my Digital Archive on this topic, the Loyola Student Publication Archive which can be accessed here.
When I began working on my archive on Omeka, it wasn’t an easy journey. The Omeka account overwrote my blog content, which I had worked on. Once that issue was resolved, I became certain of my topic and narrowed down the issues to be included in the archive. I chose the ‘center row‘ theme because it felt minimal, had a clean design, and presented my content in an aesthetically pleasing way. The theme has a simple black and white design with red text for navigation menu options. I appreciated the search option placed in the top left corner of the screen, making it easier to use the search functionality. I also liked the option to navigate across pages on the website with the option below, which shows the next webpage in the navigation sequence.
Once I had the design in place, I wanted three main pages: one titled ‘Home Page,’ another featuring an interpretative essay about the archive, titled ‘About the Archive,’ and finally a page displaying the six issues under the title ‘Browse The Archive.’ I encountered difficulties when I tried to add items to the archive. While I eventually got the thumbnails to appear, I couldn’t arrange them in chronological order.
In terms of modules, I incorporated two. The first is the ‘Metadata Browse’ module, which hyperlinks various parts of metadata together and highlights them for easier searching. The module, ‘Extract Text,’ was meant to be useful but ended up causing confusion. It extracted text from the PDFs but didn’t allow me to check or edit it, rendering it unusable for the archive. I, then added the thumbnails and added the six issues to the site. I, then wanted to exhibit the PDF files more authentically instead of just the thumbnails, that’s when I found the second module ‘PDF Embed’ which adds the PDF as a media item to the page, and also creates a viewer so that the PDF can be viewed clearly. This I felt did justice to the material and helped me present it clearly, though it does cause the reader to scroll. I am glad I was able to do my best for the archive, though I downloaded way too plugins and modules (I went into a rabbit hole figuring things out), this was a fun experience.
I hope you will have fun reading the issues, as much I did selecting them!
This is great, Shwetha. Sounds like you did a lot of work here. But I can’t find a link to the archive?
Lovely, Shwetha! Really cool topic choice. I spent quite a bit of time perusing and it was so easy to let myself get lost in the details of the various articles and advertisements; even things like seeing certain street names in the addresses had me resisting the temptation to go look up the Google Street View of those places today. You brought up some cool design observations that enhanced my perusal, too.
The embedding of the newspapers is a great element to utilize, and though the framing of them on the index page is partially cut off, I could see everything fine on individual pages and could even more easily explore when I right-clicked and opened the PDF in a separate tab (but perhaps that’s cheating!). I’m not sure either about ordering within the archive, but looked at mine and noticed my theme had a little drop-down to pick certain orders. Since they appear in reverse-chronological order, I looked at 1969 first and afterwards skipped to the bottom to move back upwards. It would be unfortunate to have to pick a new theme, but maybe yours has some modifiability on the coding end of things. I would definitely explore the fully fleshed-out version of this archive!
I love your choice of student-related exposition. The limited but broad perspective on the newspapers also serves to achieve two major goals at the same time: preserving the student newspaper, and preserving the content of each decade from 1924 to 1969. A reader upon coming to your archive can peruse the events that happened in each decade your paper covers. I was pretty elated by such a choice, as an avid reader of the newspaper myself.
I experienced difficulty in zooming into each paper unless I decide to download it. I don’t know if it’s from my end or if the module makes it restrictive. Either way, great choice to exhibit the events that have shaped Mundelein College.
This is great, Shwetha! I like your site’s aesthetics -it is clean, and navigation is easy. You know I love old newspapers/ reading materials — so I think this is really cool. I know you were having issues with the PDFs, but their presentation here is clean. I did not have the same problem as Jerry; the zoom feature works just fine on my end. Also, the module that links items together by metadata is cool! I know with the small sample size here, it can be hard to tell how it works/what the search process looks like, but you’ve given us a glimpse into that process. Very cool!