Narrowing down a Topic

Hello again,

As I have mentioned before, and as many of you that know me know, that I love the meshing of technology and Museums. Most notably in the preservation and archival field. Yet I'm also finding that the cultural aspect of preservation is a topic that I really want to explore.

I've basically narrowed down my topics to two possible ones.

One possible topic would be one that focuses on how the Museum and Archival field are handling the digitization of dying cultures. This would focus on the interaction that academics and cultural leaders of these remote or indigenous peoples have. How each other interacts and how they come to as a happy medium as to preserving and recordings of their precious knowledge and experiences can be preserved. I am really curious how this topic is being approached and how it occurs regionally as we have an emphasis in the area on native peoples and their cultures and how it does impact the local history.

 Another topic that I was considering was one that looked at how smaller Museums are being dealt with when it came to their plans and means of having a digital presence, but also how they are digitizing if at all any of their often special collections. I know that a lot of academic institutions have placed a lot of funding and resources to open access of collections and I wanted to delve into how the partnership and  private smaller museums tackle or approach this growing field.

If anyone has any preference to either topic please let me know I would certainly liked to hear some opinions on which is more interesting to people and also what are some areas people would like me to cover in each idea.

Senior thesis, Susana Flores

After working on my co-op with American School of the Deaf (ASD) during recent summer with researches and cataloging their archive. I realized that American School for the Deaf has tremendous collections related to deaf studies, its history of first deaf institution, their founding fathers and e.t.c. of historical artifact but they didn't have a proper digital archive to share with their community. Right there was a breaking point for me because after taking up Museum studies course with digital age, these historical artifacts and informations should be shared with public via online. The concept of developing proper digital archive doesn't only apply to ASD but hopefully applies to other libraries with deaf studies collection / archive.

I already knew as a fact that American School of the Deaf is in the process of building their connection with Connecticut Digital Archive under University of Connecticut library. I'm uncertain about Gallaudet University with their digital archive since there is insufficient information about their historical artifacts online.  For my senior thesis project, I will need to do more research and do some interviews with curators / directors about their digital archives and their ownership rights with their archive artifacts. Hopefully, we could discuss about opportunity of develop and improvise their digital archive from there.