Digitization Project

Present: Felker, Merchant, Stanley

We spent most of the first part of this meeting bringing Holt up to speed on the project: what we are trying to do, our limitations, etc.

We agreed that the Barclay letters are a really good collection for this project. Scanning of those items will continue. For right now, we are storing them on the portable hard drive in my office.

We decided to look at the metadata that other digital projects are using to classify historical materials. Vaughan will contact some of the people at UVA to ask about the organizational information they keep, And i will do some hunting on the web for other examples.

I also agreed to send Holt a few examples of the digitized images to look at.

I will call another meeting in a week or so.

I've been doing some searching for metadata information for the past few days, and unfortunately, am not having a lot of luck. Some of the letter projects are using metadata in ways that we can't because of technical limitations. Many simply do not have any metadata information readily available, or the information they do have available is at a level of detail that's not really sufficient for our needs. And some of them are part of much larger projects that have complicated metadata schemas designed for a large collection made up of many different kinds of objects-letters, maps, photos, etc.

We may not need a template from another project to begin with. Our archive is actually pretty rigid about the types of data it expects to receive. It is using a framework called Dublin Core, which calls for specific information to be attached to every uploaded object. You can read more about the Dublin core elements at their webpage.

To summarize, there are fifteen elements that are used to describe any object uploaded into the archive. We cannot add more elements. We could choose to "ignore" certain elements by not filling them out with any information. Each element has a name and a general indication of what type of data should be entered into it. For example, the "title" element is defined as "the name by which the resource is formally known." The descriptions of the information that go into each element are fairly vague-it is up to us to decide what "title" means in the context of a specific collection.

So the question before us is not "what types of information do we want to keep about this project." It is instead, "How will we use these fifteen elements to describe the items in this collection?"

Take the "title" example above. Do we want a title for every letter? If so, how do we form that title? Do we take the letter writers name, append the date of the letter, and enter that as "title?" Or do we form a title in some other, completely different way? Or not use that element at all (leave it blank)?