The Digital Drawer: A Crowd-Sourced, Curated, Digital Archive Preserving History and Memory

Abstract

While many digital asset management platforms and digital libraries exist, most have been designed for technically savvy users and not the older adults who are a key audience for our Digital Drawer platform. In the domain of digital humanities collections, our project is significant in that we are utilizing a participatory design (PD) process wherein all of the stakeholders and potential users of a system are actively involved in the design process to help insure the result meets their needs and is usable. This paper presents a case study on the PD process and the challenges of designing a crowd-sourced media and metadata submission tool for the Historic Rural Churches of Georgia to accommodate older adult users with low technical savvy and disabilities. We report on the PD process to design the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) for this user demographic, present conclusions and plans for future work.