Using Tropy to organize and annotate your image collections for research

Requirement: Computers with Tropy pre-installed will be available for this session. If you wish to use your own device, before the session please install Tropy v1.12.0 and the plugins found on the site.

Many researchers, archivists and even librarians as my case, are constantly being overwhelmed with photographs - hard copies/digital- that we sometimes receive from the digital archive and feel that they are “lost” or unidentified in their own environment due to the lack of associated content.

The proposed workshop seeks to shed light on the ways to give your photos a remarkable identity and put them in a context that is helpful for research materials and the digital archive in general. Tropy - a friendly editing open source interface - allows customized templates that fit your research. Tropy can add value to your data by visually managing, describing, organizing, annotating and much more to your photographs of research materials to save time, optimize your organization, and manage your photos using a digital asset management tool.

Workshop outline:

• Overview of the software / Tropy basics and fundamentals
• What is metadata and how do we use it
• Overview on few schemas
• A brief introduction about cultural heritage
• Present a cultural heritage case study or provide a walkthrough of a particular research project in as “The Post Cards” Collection from our Library’s Digital Collection involving archival materials to demonstrate how Tropy can ease research and information retrieval. (These projects were not done using Tropy but we figured later that using this open source tool would have facilitated the process).
• Showing how Tropy might connect with workflows attendees as Omeka projects, Zotero collections, etc.
• Hands-on and Application on the software as we progress
• Q&A section