Project leads: Kate Baumgartner (Assistant Technical Director) & Erik Sanning (Technical Director)
Vivero Fellow (Fall 2026): Meryem Koksal
Vivero Fellow (2023-2024, 2024-2025, 2025-2026): Chloe Kelly
Link: Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies Production Archive
Background: The Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies has been working with the Vivero program to develop a new production media repository featuring show photos, playbills, posters, news articles, and more. This material is valuable to prospective students seeking a sense of our program’s history; alumni and professional collaborators who need photos for their portfolios; and current students, staff, and faculty who want to promote the program or explore creative avenues from our recent past. These stakeholders deserve an archive that is easily browsable, searchable, accessible, and rich in metadata—nearly all of which our previous media archive lacked. Our newly launched TDPS Media Archive was built by Vivero Fellow Chloe Kelly ’26 using the open-source CollectionBuilder framework. We are exceptionally pleased with the result and are now migrating a truly massive quantity of archival media and metadata. Mark McFate, Grinnell College Digital Library Applications Developer, has been an invaluable collaborator as we improve the migration process and refine how content is displayed.
Next Steps: Our ideal next Vivero collaboration would involve substantial content mining across numerous sources and stakeholders. Some possibilities:
- We recently learned that the S&B photo archive is extensive (understatement of the century) and well organized, but largely untapped. It may contain production photos that fill gaps or round out our current collection.
- We would like to collect media from students, alumni, and guest designers, but we have not yet determined the best communication process or digital tools for collecting content and metadata.
- We have found a handful of S&B articles covering our productions, but we are reasonably certain we have only scratched the surface of that source.
- Our current archival materials date back to roughly 1970, though playbills and posters are not consistently available. Our “show records” extend back to the 1880s. Collaboration with local archive specialists could help fill gaps and extend our reach further into the past.
- Much of each production’s metadata is buried in its playbill. Extracting names and other information is a mind-numbing, time-consuming task. AI tools may be able to help, but none are perfect, and playbill formatting often creates additional complications. Researching and comparing these tools could ultimately save hours upon hours of labor.
- Our metadata may contain typos and inconsistencies, particularly in student and collaborator names. If a name was incorrect in the playbill, it may also be incorrect in the metadata. Developing ways to identify and correct these errors (perhaps through “fuzzy search” algorithms) would be valuable.
- There are stories and contextual materials we may want to add to the archive, such as the history of our performance venues and creative spaces, or a profile of Hallie Flanagan Davis, Class of 1911. This work may be less digitally oriented but would add significant historical context.
In addition to content mining, a Vivero Fellow could explore the CollectionBuilder framework, both as an educational opportunity and to identify lesser-known tools/capabilities we might want to use. We probably don’t need much additional CollectionBuilder support now that the site is launched and we are collaborating with Mark, but CollectionBuilder is an excellent tool that more people could/should understand and appreciate.
