Week One: Don't You (Forget About Me)
Hello, reader! As I promised in my last blog, I’ve returned for the Fall 2026 semester to continue my work on my digital exhibit, “The Man Behind the Receipts: Preserving the Legacy of Michael Gladden Jr,” with UCF's STARS repository. While on break between semesters, Sarah Norris and I met over Teams to discuss the logistics of the digital exhibit, including metadata fields, copyright statements, and artifactual accessibility. It was amazing seeing what features STARS had to offer for the various formats of materials permanently housed on the repository.
During our meeting, we explored fancy pop-up viewers, alternate pages for the verso side of artifacts, and the ability to create and connect Wikidata assets. Based on our chat, I drafted a base metadata format to best meet the needs of my image- and text-based objects, excluding object-specific fields which are yet to be determined. These fields will include Title, Alternative Title, Collection, Historical Background, Date Created, Place, Subject - Person (Linked Data), Format, Language, Type, Number of Images, Side of Image, Digital Reproduction Specifications, Rights, and Curator. Though the test site currently reflects object descriptions housed here on the Gladden Archive, each object will have a customized description that adds both informational and narrative value to the overarching exhibit. To address my concerns about copyright, Sarah is now working on a copyright statement that reflects Ms. Boykin’s ownership of the Gladden Collection and my authorship of the digital exhibit. In addition to everything, we were able to set up an in-person digitization meeting at UCF Libraries to scan some of the large Gladden artifacts at last. The meeting is set for next Tuesday, September 1st- I am eager to report back with some of my new scans next week!
Once I have the new scans, I look forward to adding them to the Gladden Archive as well as the digital exhibit on STARS. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been thinking about adding more educational pages to the Gladden Archive over time. While perusing through one of the Gladden binders, I realized that I have a few of Michael Gladden Sr.’s poll tax receipts from the 1920s. I plan on creating a separate collection for Michael Gladden Sr. alongside an informative page on segregation and voting rights in Central Florida. In addition to that idea, I hope to scan a collection of Marie Stapler Gladden’s schoolbooks she taught from in her extensive career in education after digitizing the first wave of large Gladden artifacts with STARS’ assistance. While writing a short bio for Michael Gladden Jr., it saddened me to see that no historical statistics for Black literacy exist for Central Florida online, nor any sources that even name which materials Black schoolchildren learned from in this area. Depending on copyright, I would love to have the books digitized and made available through the Gladden Archive and STARS for community members and researchers to reference, especially in the area of the history of Black education and educators. As I keep brainstorming ideas to expand the website, I’ll definitely mention them in my future blogs!
I can’t wait to tell you about my experience at UCF Libraries next week, reader! More good things to come this semester!
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