The end user experience

I enjoyed our skype meeting with Bailey Smith and Anne Wooten (whom I found inspiring for their accomplishments especially melding the technical and the creative aspects of digital archiving). One take away from our discussion was the importance of the user experience. Their focus on both the producers (or archivists) as well as the consumers of the audio digital archives seemed important to me. The Pop Up Archive was developed for people with not too much technical expertise (like us or me anyway) and limited resources.

For the last 3 weeks, we have been immersed in metadata, scanning and learning new software. I can see how it’s easy to lose focus on the end user. Other issues, such as internal institutional concerns or technical limitations, can easily get in the way.