Good documentation requires specificity. Each step of the process or workflow needs to be outlined. Care should be taken to avoid any vagueness in the instructions. To avoid this ambiguity, good documentation might sometimes need visual prompts (probably screenshots) to accompany the written instruction. The visuals need to help make the instructions clearer, not more confusing. So if, for example, the instructions require the user to use one tool among many on a ribbon or taskbar, the visuals should clearly show which tool is being referred to. Good documentation does not assume that it is okay to skip the things that ‘everyone knows how to do’, because the purpose of documentation is to make sure that someone who does not know how to do anything can follow the instructions and arrive at the intended result.
For the Native History project, I can’t think of any documentation we would need to create, because the project has been going on for some time now. Documentation that I think are necessary for the project are in relation to creating metadata and uploading the items to Omeka, and I’m pretty sure that those have already been created.
One thing I’m not sure about right now is whether the images used in the unit are assigned metadata and uploaded to Omeka as separate items. If not, I think it might be a good idea to create a ‘library’ of sorts for the images used in the Taino unit. Having in one document all the images associated with the unit might be a good idea for organizing them, and for getting a bird’s eye view of the unit. However, based on the general style guide, I assume that the pictures would already be uploaded as their own items, so my documentation idea may not be necessary.
