How Technology can be used to preserve and exhibit archival collections: A Digital Humanities Passion Project

Over the summer, I interned at the Ricci Institute located on the Brighton Campus at Boston College. My job largely involved working with an archival collection donated to the Ricci Institute, a research institute and library focusing on east and west relationships with a focus on missionary work. The collection consisted of letters from 1890-1940 detailing two siblings' missionary work in Korea and China.

While my job was to mainly catalogue and read through these letters, on my own time, I also chose to explore how to digitally exhibit them to enhance the themes of the letters and create a substantive story and history.

I'm currently exploring how archival interfaces work and their pros and cons. Creating tools and products for archivists look vastly different than products for the regular public. For example, archivists priortize search engines and cataloguing tools rather than the UI design. While there is no website to show (yet), here is one of the resources I used as well as a letter from the collection: