The Mukurtu CMS team, along with Folklife Specialist Guha Shankar from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, were welcomed to the Zuni Public Library in Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico on March 16th and 17th, 2016. The purpose of the visit was twofold: to have a day of training in using Mukurtu CMS to provide access to digital collections, and to hold a community workshop to gather information and stories about a collection of photographs from Zuni in the 1960s and 1970s. Our hosts at the Zuni Public Library, Jennifer Lonjose and Cordelia Hooee, were eager to jump in and learn the tips and tricks of using the Mukurtu CMS platform.
On the first day Jennifer, the Mukurtu team, and Shankar dove into the planning and big-picture ideas of setting up a Mukurtu site for the Zuni Public Library. The library is going to start out with creating Communities, Cultural Protocols, and Categories/Keywords that make sense for their first Mukurtu project, but can be adapted once more materials are added. In the afternoon, Hooee joined the meeting and was pleased to discover the improvements released in the latest version of Mukurtu – she has been a part of Mukurtu since version 1.5! The next step was to get into the more technical details of Mukurtu CMS: how to add a digital heritage item, what metadata fields are available, how to add users, and more! Lonjose and Hooee were quick learners, and even helped us evaluate further additions to Mukurtu that would be helpful to communities, such as the Glossary feature that is currently in development.
The Mukurtu team helped the Zuni Public Library in its first community workshop involving a photograph collection. Community members came in to the library to look at the photographs, share their memories, and learn about Mukurtu CMS, and how it will allow the community to add information about this collection and others, and choose how that information is shared. The Mukurtu team helped document what people shared about each photograph, either by recording high quality audio files, or taking down notes as people talked. The community members who participated were very interested in the photographs, and moved by the remembrances that the images brought back, many were excited to have this resource available, and wanted to tell others!
Post by Lotus Norton-Wisla
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