Over the course of my USRI, I created a database to organize and display the costume collection from the Don Wright Faculty of Music Opera Program at Western University. This process consisted of a series of phases with a focus on digitizing the costume collection so that it is accessible and sustainable. Extraction, sorting, creation, development, photograph, organization, and consultation constituted the progression of the new costume database. The extraction phase featured the removal and assessment of the costumes. This provided a visualization of the costume collection in its entirety and thus, guided the creation of the database. The sorting phase resulted in the approval, elimination, and categorization of different sets of costumes. Next, Excel spreadsheets equipped with a a piece-personalized code, hosted on Microsoft Teams, were utilized during the creation and development phases. This culminated in the creation of the system to categorize and store the different pieces in the costume collection. The photograph phase incorporated capturing the costume pieces and uploading them online to a custom made OWL site, eliminating the need to search for the pieces physically. Manual transportation was the main feature of the organization phase, resulting in the collection being moved to its permanent space, a space corresponding with the newly created online, remotely accessible database. Lastly, consultation occurred throughout the internship. Multiple correspondences were established with professional costume designers to help mold the system to better suit the digitization, accessibility, and sustainability of the Don Wright Faculty of Music costume collection
