Chronicling African American Women Students at the University of Iowa

摘要

This collection demonstrates the benefits of controlled item-level description for facilitating discovery through virtual collection environments. The experimental nature of this project along with its purpose as a teaching tool inevitably raised questions. Is there a place in mass digitization projects for selective item-level description? How can institutions best set priorities for directing limited resources to item-level description? How can institutions leverage both the research that grows from use of their archival collections as well as the organizational knowledge of the archivists who maintain those collections to guide selection of materials for item-level description?