Brown: Before and After

I viewed the digital collection of documents and photographs titled Brown: Before and After at Virginia State University. It is a collection highlighting the materials in its special collections regarding Brown vs. Board of Education Committee from 1954 which eliminated “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites.

Selection Decisions:

Although a dozen or so primary documents are listed, there are only four digitized documents and no crossover between the two. In this way, the “digital collection” is really more of a finding aid. They also selected about 20 photos to digitize. There is no information about the collection to help me determine what they decided to digitize.

Metadata:

Each of the four scanned documents has a title and paragraph of information. There is no controlled vocabulary or set fields in which any particular information has been recorded. There is no categorical searching or browsing. Each of the photographs has only a caption that may give a date or location but contains no additional metadata.

Object Characteristics:

The documents are in PDF. They are not OCR’d. The photographs are jpegs that can not be enlarged. They have no alternate text. There is no information about how they were captured.

Intended Audience:

The best thing about this collection is probably the list of about a dozen related links including other digital collections of Brown v. Board documents that seem better organized and wider reaching in scope. This may make the collection tangentially useful to a researcher. There is also a simplified legal timeline that may be useful to a law school student.