Frank Westermann's Archive

About this collection

This digital collection features a selection of postcards from the first half of the twentieth century, covering locations in Europe and the United States. It was created as part of a graduate seminar in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focused on digital history methods. The project was designed to introduce PhD students to the practical and conceptual work involved in building a digital archive.

The postcards were not chosen for their content or provenance, but as a sample set to help us learn the process of digitization, cataloging, and curating materials for an online environment. Throughout the course, we engaged with key skills including scanning, file management, metadata creation, and digital organization. A major focus was learning how to structure metadata categories in a way that makes materials accessible and meaningful to future users. This included using standards such as Dublin Core and considering how descriptive choices shape the interpretation of a digital object.

While the collection is relatively small and based on a random set of postcards, one informal narrative emerged around a man named Frank, whose travels and correspondence with someone named Elsie suggested a possible relationship. As part of learning to work with historical sources in digital form, we explored genealogy platforms like FamilySearch and Ancestry to practice contextualizing fragmented personal records with publicly available data. This exercise raised useful questions about how digital historians can responsibly supplement collections with external sources.

One of the key takeaways from the project was that technical skills alone are not enough for effective digital curation. Decisions about metadata, layout, organization, and descriptive language all influence how a collection is interpreted and used. We also learned that digital archives must balance structure with openness to user exploration, and that curating even a modest selection of materials involves thoughtful choices about what to highlight and how.

Overall, this project provided hands-on experience with digital archival work, while also encouraging critical reflection on the roles that digital tools, narrative construction, and metadata play in shaping historical understanding.