A short video I made while volunteering with HistoryMiami’s folklife program captures a deceptively simple part of archival work: turning a spare photo caption into a richer, more searchable record.
Watch the original video in Google Drive. Recorded during my volunteer work at HistoryMiami; running time approximately 2 minutes.
Returning to the Florida Keys through the archive
For a few hours each week, I volunteered at HistoryMiami Museum—now the Museum of Miami—researching and enhancing descriptions of digitized materials from its folklife collections. My focus was Folk Arts of the Florida Keys, a collection of documentation from 1990. At that stage, I was recording the enriched metadata in spreadsheets, not entering it directly into the museum’s collections management system.
Having done folklife fieldwork myself, I found the work particularly satisfying. Instead of conducting a new interview or making photographs, I was examining an earlier researcher’s documentation and asking what it might still tell us—and how to make that knowledge findable.
Who was Brent Cantrell?
Brent Cantrell was the folklorist whose field documentation formed the basis of the Keys material I was describing. Working with the Historical Museum of Southern Florida’s Folklife Program, a predecessor of HistoryMiami, he researched traditional life and folk arts in the Upper and Middle Florida Keys around 1990. His photographs, field journals, and collected ephemera preserve information about craftspeople, working traditions, art, and everyday cultural practices.
Cantrell also wrote Key Largo to Marathon: A Report on the Folklife of the Upper and Middle Keys, published in South Florida History in 1990 and later reprinted in The Florida Folklife Reader. His work situated the region’s distinctive traditions within its maritime economy, periods of isolation, migrations, and rapid change. My role was not to repeat his survey, but to draw more usable descriptive information from the evidence he had already assembled.
A photograph called “Cotton Gin Store”
In the video, I use a photograph originally identified simply as Cotton Gin Store. That title was correct, but it offered very little help to someone researching folk art in the Keys. Looking closely revealed Raggedy Ann-style dolls, quilts, a sign, a wagon mailbox, and chairs constructed from PVC pipe. Each detail provided another way a researcher might discover the image.
Other slides and Cantrell’s field journal supplied context beyond the visible scene. The surviving metadata spreadsheet records the store’s location on the ocean side between Rock Harbor and Tavernier, near mile marker 94½, and identifies the craftsperson as Ida Welborn. The journal notes preserved alongside the record also document family connections to quilting. These are the kinds of details a filename alone could never convey.
Why the extra description matters
Metadata can sound like routine data entry. In practice, meaningful archival description requires interpretation grounded in evidence. A detail such as a PVC-pipe chair might be significant to someone researching vernacular craft; a quilt might be the entry point for another researcher; an address can reconnect an image with a changing landscape.
Cantrell’s fieldwork did the essential work of documenting these people and practices. Revisiting his notes decades later gave me a way to carry that knowledge forward. The goal was simple: help a future researcher find something they might not have known was there.
Project Catalog CardView the project record, role, trajectory & what survives
| Project | Folk Arts of the Florida Keys — archival metadata enhancement |
|---|---|
| Institution | HistoryMiami Museum (now Museum of Miami); original 1990 survey undertaken for the Historical Museum of Southern Florida |
| Period | Original fieldwork: 1990. Later spreadsheet-based volunteer metadata work: date not yet established. |
| Role | Researched photographs, slides, field journals and contextual materials; enriched descriptive metadata in working spreadsheets. |
| Problem | Sparse captions made it difficult to discover crafts, people, locations and cultural practices documented in the photographs. |
| Practice | Compared related images and Brent Cantrell’s field notes, identifying additional visual details, attribution and geographic context. |
| What happened | Expanded entries such as “Cotton Gin Store” with descriptions of quilts, dolls, PVC-pipe chairs, location and related context. |
| What survives | Phone video documenting the work; surviving metadata spreadsheet; links to Cantrell’s 1990 published account and museum research resources. |
| Trajectory | 1990 folklife fieldwork → digitized archival materials → later metadata enrichment → future research access. |
| Status | Working spreadsheet and original video recovered; subsequent import or publication of individual records not verified. |
Supporting Documents & Sources Browse the original recording, transcript & surviving records
Folk Arts of the Florida Keys working metadata spreadsheet — including Cotton Gin Store record 1990-121-20.
Brent Cantrell, “Key Largo to Marathon,” South Florida History (1990).
Museum of Miami — online collections catalog, finding aids & digital library.
Read video transcript (2:02)
Lightly edited for punctuation and obvious transcription errors; timestamps refer to the original video.
0:01 So, I’m at HistoryMiami, where I volunteer a few hours a week in the folklife program to record and enhance metadata related to digital files.
0:10 The project that I’m working on is Folk Arts of the Florida Keys. Mine is always in the Keys, so I’m really enjoying this project.
0:18 Basically, just recording extra description related to this collection. And I’ll give you an example of what we do.
0:23 Here is an image that I recently worked on. And the original name for the file was just Cotton Gin Store. It’s very accurate. That is the name of the store. But what other description could be added based on this photo?
0:39 We’ve got the dolls, Raggedy Ann and Andy. We’ve got the quilts, and those are traditional styles that could be recorded as well. Someone might be looking for those.
0:50 Type of sign, the actual location of the store, even a detail like the chairs that the dolls are sitting in are made of PVC pipes. So that’s a particular type of art and it’s something that a researcher might be looking for.
1:07 So what do we use to find out these details? Well, this came from a slide. This project was done in 1990, so we have many, many more slides; only a few were digitized. The additional shots give extra context to that story.
1:31 Additionally, we’ve got the folklorist’s journal, and he was a very good one, kept records of everything. His name was Brent Cantrell, and actually that’s a form of metadata, that he was the one who worked on the project. So we’ve added that. But his notes, and even the business cards that he keeps, it’s got the exact location of where the Cotton Gin was and we can add that in as well.
1:58 So that’s metadata.
Archive Note / Provenance What survives, what was documented & limits of the record
This article pairs a contemporary phone recording of volunteer research with a surviving descriptive spreadsheet. The photographs and field notes originated in Brent Cantrell’s 1990 project; the later metadata enrichment was carried out at HistoryMiami in spreadsheets. The documentation does not establish that these records were imported into a public collections system. Collection materials remain subject to museum rights and access conditions.
Critical Questions + Add to the Record
- What cultural knowledge is missed when an archive records only a photograph’s original caption?
- Which details in the Keys folk art photographs could community members identify that an outside researcher might overlook?
- How should archives distinguish original field observations from later interpretation?
In this case, a simple “Cotton Gin Store” caption became a more useful record through careful description, surrounding slides, and Cantrell’s notebooks. If you know the people, places, crafts, or traditions documented in the collection, your corrections and context could deepen that record.
Share context, corrections, or additional source material related to the project.
Leave a Reply