Daily Blog #3: Digitization of the Puffenberger Religious Artifacts Collection

Even with all of the rain and clouds, today was a very productive day! We started our day off with a meeting that focused on our goals for the day and discussed the World Religions Paradigm and how it relates to our project. The World Religion Paradigm is the idea that when religion is taught academically, the curriculum is mostly based on Western-based religions, such as Christianity and Judaism. This discussion helped with our decision to ultimately have each religious tradition be represented by a separate collection page on our Omeka website. After our discussion, I went to ITS in order to find out more about how the Omeka site could be held on the school’s server. After emails and conversations, it looks like we are unable to host our website on the school’s server because of storage issues. Even though this was upsetting news, we are now planning on just using Omeka.net to host our website. Before lunch, I did some research on the proper way to take photos of the artifacts and also printed out a scale sheet that I will use to show the size of the artifact in the picture.

After lunch, I decided to start taking photos of some of the artifacts and as a result, I became more familiar with the camera technology. I used the pop-up picture box that has a plain white background in order to capture the photos. I took photos of a Menorah, a Bamboo Flute, a glass statue of the Virgin Mary, and the Bronze Krishna with wooden flute. After I took the photos, I uploaded them to the computer and edited them. I then uploaded them to our Omeka trail site, just to get some experience using the website. After I uploaded two of the items on the website, I included all of the information we have so far and tagged the artifacts. This was a huge milestone for me because I am now really comfortable working on the Omeka site and the pictures that I took of the artifacts turned out great!

-Hannah Ciocco