IRLS 675 Unit1

This is my new blog page for IRLS 675 where I will be documenting my personal experience setting up a digital collection.

Since my area of expertise is not library science, I will instead focus my collection on my previous profession; textile design. My collection will consist of items related to the fashion and textile designs of a hypothetical up and coming clothing manufacturer. The items in my collection are both born digital files and digital surrogates for actual garments and textiles.

From my past experiences working for clothing manufacturers, I found it rare that there were systems in place for organizing digital sketches and other files created by designers, that could be easily accessed by the rest of the company. Now even though these files were created at the request of the sales department, they could not access the digital files without the assistance of a designer. If a sales person wanted to go back and see all the garment sketches that were created for a particular season there was no easy way of doing that.

The creation a well organized, search-able database would grant access to files that can be referenced and/or modified by other departments. For instance, if a garment is selected for sampling, the pattern-making department could append the pattern file or production specifications could be added by the production team, after a garment is picked up by a retailer, but I'm getting ahead of myself since I don't have any of these additional files.

To start, the main purpose the database will be to house, the current seasons inspiration boards, digital surrogates of fabric available for use and images of the garments from the first production season.  All the important information about a garment, a production season and the sample fabric inventory, will be stored and accessible from one centralized location.