About the Project
This project is an online collection of digital and physical material that revolves around the individuals and organizations associated with Bradley Academy and Holloway High School. The collection encompasses material from the antebellum era up until the latter decades of the twentieth century and strives to highlight the impact and legacy of this African American institution in Rutherford County. For decades Bradley Academy served as a place for community empowerment, educational advancement, and cultural esteem, which we hope the online collection will reinforce.
The online collection that we have subsequently created is an attempt to increase Bradley Academy Museum and Cultural Center’s profile and have platform where the general public, alumni, and researchers can gain deeper understanding of African American institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth century.
In terms of developing the metadata for our website, we used official publications from Dublin Core to determine the input for the metadata. The collection offered a few challenges during the metadata writing process, largely due to the diverse nature of the materials included in the collection. Additionally, many items in the collection lacked appropriate contextualization, making it hard to offer more than a basic title.
Our choices for tags evolved from two major considerations. Firstly, we wanted to create a general, master list of tags for the team to use. This would provide examples for the team during the tagging process in addition to reducing the risks from grammar, spelling, and capitalization inconsistencies. Secondly, the master list was designed while keeping the projected audience in mind. Whether the exhibit was displayed locally at Bradley Academy or uploaded to a website, we predicted that Holloway High alumni and their families would initially constitute the audience of this website. Many of our tags were designed so that members of this audience could search for clubs or graduating classes that they or their family were involved in.
The project team would like to thank Bradley Academy Museum and Cultural Center for allowing the use of the Bradley Academy Historical Association Collection for this digital archive. Without the support and work of the museum, this project would not have been possible. They would also like to thank the many individual community members who donated their personal photographs, as well as the Bradley Academy and Holloway memorabilia that make up the collection.