The Arquin Slide Project in Panorama

Since late summer 2023 my colleague Dr. Emily Fenichel and I worked on a 2000-word piece on The Arquin Slide Project. The funded NEH grant to digitize, catalogue, and make public the slides officially concluded in Spring 2023 and the project is officially launched. After almost three years of work with students cataloging and translating metadata, the collection is available as an online resource. The project was a learning process in project management but also about creating workflows to complete the metadata, translations, working with Omeka and with a team in the Office of Information Technologies at FAU.

The published piece gives context to the collection and the work of Florence Arquin with the State Department in the 1940s. We also describe and reflect on the process of making the project and fulfilling the collection’s purpose. The piece is part of a new section called “Digital Dialogues” of Panorama, the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. The article is available here.