Amelia Earhart Collection

This week I examined the George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers at Purdue University.

Collection Principles: Purdue���s collection includes correspondence, photographs, printed material, scrapbooks, and personal belongings relating to Earhart���s personal life, career, and business activities. The digital version of this collection includes 3,500 digital images of photographs, maps, and medals covering the same topics as the original collection, including copies of photographs and maps used on her last flight that she mailed back to her husband en route. Earhart's medals are also an important part of the digital collection. Additionally, there is a link to Purdue���s 75 page PDF finding aid that details the entire collection housed in their archives.

Metadata: The digital collection is traditionally formatted with a thumbnail of the object, the title, subject, and description laid out in a row. Each object has great metadata in addition to the information given on the main page. When the user views an object, they also see the object���s metadata and the technical metadata for the digital version. For each object, the metadata fields include ID number, title, description, repository location, date of original, type, format, language, collection, subjects, collection website, rights information, capture device, capture details, date scanned, color depth, and color management.

Object Characteristics: Most of the objects were scanned with 24 bit color at 600 ppi using an Epson Expression 10000XL Photo Scanner and Silverfast 6.4.1 software by Lazersoft. Most of the flat images have their format listed as JP2, although some of Earhart���s medals are viewed through QuickTime for continuous zooming and manipulation. The regular digital images can be zoomed in up to three stages.

Audience: I think this collection can be beneficial to a wide variety of audiences. Since it is the largest collection of Amelia Earhart ephemera and the quality of the metadata is so good, I think this site could be useful to researchers. But also as a casual browser, I found the site interesting as well. It would be helpful for someone with less knowledge about the subject if the site had a more browsable interface, since it is hard to come up with keywords on an unfamiliar topic. Otherwise the user is left to search through the whole collection, or use the finding aid, although it is quite lengthy and probably not of interest to a casual user. In that aspect, this site might be more successfully used by someone with a serious interest in Earhart.