Digitization Project

On this one, I am labeling everything with the field into which it will go.

Publisher

"Washington and Lee Special Collections"

This information is uniform for all items.

Date.created

This should be filled in with the date the letter was written, in dd/mm/yyyy format.

Title

We are still working on how to formulate unique titles for each document.

Description

This field will contain a one to three sentence description of the letter created by our volunteer and vetted by our historian.

Keywords

This will contain zero to an unlimited number of key phrases or words that describe important concepts in the letter. These phrases are not part of a formal subject classification system. They are selected by our volunteer and expanded and vetted by our historian.

Type

We had wanted this field to be "letter," but the choices seem to be fixed, and letter is not one of them. So I am using "image."

Not metadata per se, the title of the collection within Dspace shall be:

"The letters of John Barclay (MSS number)"

We had discussed the neccessity of creating a page or document describing the collection. there are a few ways to go about doing this:

* Within Dspace, each collection has a "description" field. To see what this looks like when displayed, go here: http://dspace.nitle.org/handle/10090/1065

* I could try to find an existing field in the database to use. for a URL, as we discussed previously.

I took our prototype metadata framework and tried using it to load a sample item into the database yesterday. There were a couple of problems:

* While the "date.created" field does exist, the only way to load any information into this field is to go in as an admin AFTER the entire submission process is over and put in in manually. Worse than this, you can't search on this field. At all. The only date Dspace seems to care about is the date the item was loaded into the system.

* Likewise, the "publisher" field has to be filled out manually after the entire submission process is over, and this also cannot be searched on.

* The "type" field, which we had wanted to be able to set as "letter" has only fixed choices, and "letter" is not one of them. I was able to manually edit this field, but only after the entire submission process is done.