Digitization Project

Some of the things I was asked to look into last time:

1. Character limits in the Dspace archive: There appear to be none anywhere. I tried loading an item with a page worth of text from wikipedia entered for every free-text field...and it took the information and displayed it. However, there still may be character limits in the external services that might harvest our data, so it would still be wise to keep them reasonably short.

2. Copyright: I called Sally Waint, who is our resident copyright expert. She said we are good to go.

3. Coverage/inclusive dates fields: These fields are free-text fields, just like most of the other fields. It seems we can put in dates in any format we like: "7/10/06" or "last tuesday." I don't see anything in the dublin core standard about how dates should be entered, but I will keep looking.

From Vaughans notes, with my own expansions:

Name of institution

This should probably be kept in the "publisher" field. We need a standardized name ("Washington and Lee?" "Washington & Lee?" "W&L?").

Name of Repository

Hmmm. I'm not seeing a field that leaps out as a logical place to put this. We could make it part of the description?

Name of collection

I'm not sure this should even go in the metadata, because we could actually use the name of the collection in the real world as the name of the collection in Dspace, where it would serve the same purpose.

MSS number of collection

Most logical place I can see would be an "identifier" field. These fields are usually used for numeric identifiers that are unique to the item, though (examples would be the ISBN number).

Are we sure we need this? If the document is available on the web, why does it matter to the user how we classify or organize the physical material? Ideally, they wouldn't even need to access the physical version. Ever.

Date of Document

I'm assuming this refers to when the letter was written. Given that, the best place would probably be the "date.created" field.

Identification of document

Is this the title? If so, it should def. go in the "title" field.

Summary Info

Definitely the "description" field.

Keywords

I think these can either be placed in the description field, or in the subject field. If we actually have some home-grown subject headings, then we ought to put those there and put keywords in the description field.