Holy Heroes!

So one of our first tasks in our Advanced Digital Collections course is to collect 15-20 digital items that we'll eventually use when we build our little mini online museums/archives. (I think.) I actually had a bit of trouble deciding what to collect. I'm sure I made it more difficult than it really is, of course. As it always does, my mind eventually drifted back to-- what else?-- Star Wars, and I hit upon my theme-- heroes.

Since the day I discovered Joseph Campbell and his ideas of the hero archetype, I've been fascinated by the type of stories that, for whatever reason, belong to the human experience whatever the culture.

So, my collection idea started from there and branched out to include a pretty broad definition of heroes-- real-life heroes, ancient heroes, superheroes, and movie heroes. Songs about heroes, radio stories of heroes, pictures of heroes, videos about heroes, and stories of heroes. I even included a satire of heroes.

Here's a list of the items in my collection:

1. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech (video)
2. Editorial about sports heroes (audio)
3. Interview with "Sully" Sullenberger (radio)
4. Superman picture (image)
5. Luke Skywalker picture a la Obama "Hope" design (image)
6. Luke Skywalker picture w/ lightsaber, black background (image)
7. Luke Skywalker picture in flight suit w/lightsaber, fire background (image)
8. George Lucas discussing Joseph Campbell (video)
9. "Have Gun Will Travel" song (audio)
10. "Superfriends" (1973) opening credits (video)
11. "Superfriends" do "Office Space" (video)
12. "The Odyssey" (pdf)
13. "Clash of the Titans" movie trailer (video)
14. "Holding out for a Hero" song (audio)
15. "What is a Hero?" CBS news segment (video)
16. Subway Hero CBS news segment (video)
17. Herakles killing the Nemean Lion vase (image)
18. Hercules comic book segment (pdf)
19. "Profiles in Courage" excerpts (pdf)
20. "The Woman Who Dared" editorial cartoon of Susan B. Anthony (image)

There could be many ways to access my collection. I might use "real" and "imaginary" as descriptors. "Ancient" and "modern" could also work. Describing by format image, sound, video, document, etc. might be useful. Keywords such as "lucas," "georgelucas," "george_lucas," "star," "wars," "starwars," star_wars," "skywalker," "lukeskywalker," "luke_skywalker," etc. can get out of hand right away. I think I'd like to enable user tagging to make keyword more efficient.

As to who might access this collection, I would think teachers, schoolchildren, and anybody with an interest in heroes. It's a broad enough subject that it should appeal to many people. It's not, however, the place to do serious research.