Personal archiving platforms can help students and faculty organize and log metadata as they build increasingly larger personal collections of images, audio, and video files. There are many platforms that can be used to manage your personal research archives, but we’ve selected three free options--Tropy, Aries and Airtable--to review. You can compare platforms and determine which features are best suited for your purposes and explore demo collections for each platform.
Why choose Tropy? Tropy is useful for researchers looking to manage large quantities of photographs taken in archives and the field. It is especially helpful for dissertation and thesis writers looking to add personalized notes to specific images.
Instructions for downloading a fully-functioning Tropy demo site can be found here.
Why choose ARIES? ARIES (ARt Image Exploration Space) is a tool for organizing, arranging and comparing images as a first step in creating a digital exhibition. It functions as a virtual light box that allows for multiple images to be compared to-scale within a project. I
To view the ARIES demo: Please write to visualresources@uchicago.edu and we will share the login information and instructions with you.
Why choose Airtable? Airtable is useful for researchers looking to collaborate with others to track large amounts of metadata online. Airtable is structured like a spreadsheet and lives online. It operates very similarly to Google Sheets, making it useful for collaborations. The spreadsheet allows for multiple fields of metadata to be input and can store images online.
To view the Airtable demo: Please write to visualresources@uchicago.edu and we will share the login information and instructions with you.