LIS Student Reflection: Lea McMahan, University of Tennessee

Building a Digital Collection with CollectionBuilder: “The Golden Girls of Porter High School”

By Lea McMahan, University of Tennessee – Knoxville

Creating a digital collection that preserves and shares a unique piece of sports history is both rewarding and powerful. Using CollectionBuilder templates and instruction, I developed The Golden Girls of Porter High School: A Legacy in 1960s Women’s Basketball, a digital collection that explores a distinctive era of women’s basketball when teams played under 6-on-6 rules on a divided half-court. This collection highlights the trailblazing Porter High School girls’ basketball teams of the 1960s and early 1970s, led by Coach Galen Johnson, whose teams brought home multiple state championships in Tennessee.

Being selected for the University of Idaho CollectionBuilder cohort allowed me to create this unique digital collection, using GitHub, Visual Studio Code and the CollectionBuilder template.

CollectionBuilder made the development process accessible, even for someone without coding experience like me. I began by selecting the CSV template and then to gather my “objects” (photographs, videos, and links as well as audio recordings) and organize them into a Google sheet broken down into metadata categories.

I was lucky enough to have access to a wide range of newspaper articles and photos, and I found links online to authentic game film footage. I did manage to create some original content by interviewing former team players and recording their stories. These firsthand accounts offer rare insight into what it was like to compete under 6-on-6 rules and describe the strategy, spirit and sense of community that characterized their time on the court.

Once the Google sheet was complete, I exported it into a CSV file and then uploaded it into Visual Studio Code editor. From there, the CollectionBuilder template is easy to use to create and modify your collection. CollectionBuilder supports metadata and search tools that make the collection easy to use and explore and is designed to be mobile-friendly and accessible.

The Golden Girls of Porter High School is more than a digital scrapbook - it’s a digital history project that attempts to preserve a unique chapter in women’s sports. It is my hope that it might ensure that the legacy of these remarkable athletes and their visionary coach lives on for future generations to discover. The collection not only celebrates athletic achievements but also documents the changing landscape of women’s roles in high school athletics before Title IX. It highlights a time when passion and talent flourished despite limited resources and recognition.

By making these stories accessible online, this collection honors the voices and experiences of women who helped pave the way for modern girls’ and women’s sports programs.

Explore the Project!