The Ivo Maroević slide collection: engaging students in digitization, cataloguing and communication

The paper discusses approaches, outcomes and experiences from an ongoing project of digitization, cataloguing and communication of the Ivo Maroević Slide Collection through the cooperation of university teachers and master level students at several courses at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS). Professor Ivo Maroević, PhD (1937 – 2007) was the founder of the Museology Section within the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at FFHS, University of Zagreb. Since the beginning of his teaching career, since 1983, he has created a rich collection of more than 9000 slides. Following the professor's teaching courses, the collection is divided into three sub-collections – Museology, Protection of Monuments and Urbanistic Topics. Ivo Maroević left extensive and structured documentation along with the slides (the slides are equipped with keywords, and the ad hoc classification is developed) that has helped to recognize the significance of the collection and to facilitate its cataloguing and further use. From the very beginning of the project, students have been involved in the digitization and cataloguing of the collection. Students also participate in the structuring of a controlled vocabulary via a multilingual thesaurus. The methods of student engagement and quality control are applied from crowdsourcing projects methodologies, but they were revised and improved concerning the specific needs and requirements of the educational context. Students are currently preparing the collection for its publication through an online multilingual catalogue, to make the collection accessible and visible in international contexts.