Well, we’ve almost finished the first 2000 photographs to be sent off to the
University of North Texas for digitization. It wasn’t so bad with three of us on the project. What have I learned? First off you need
to edit and re-edit your work.
Metadata and inventories are monotonous so mistakes are almost inevitable
at least mine seem to be. If
you’re working in Excel you have to be especially careful because, of course,
there is no spell check. That’s another reason to dislike Excel. Another is
some of the automatic features. They drive me crazy. It’s fine for
spreadsheets, but tough for inventories.
Just because the first two words are the same doesn’t mean all the rest an
entry is. I’ve done all of the
inventories before this in Word. It has its problems too. Numbering and
indenting are two of the most annoying.
All of a sudden the numbers change, indents won’t align. What’s up with
that? I try to remember to disable
the automatic features but I don’t always. Trying to do an outline is often a nightmare. Even with that I prefer Word to Excel for inventories.
What
other things might I consider doing differently? Well it would be nice to have
an expert on the collection around to help us identify individuals. We did have a book of the history of
the school and that was great and, of course, the internet is wonderful if you
have enough of a name. One area
where we needed more assistance was with dates. Most photographs were not dated, many not identified. We had to guess dates based on clothing
or the absence of computers and that sort of thing or leave the date cell
blank.
The
other thing that I might consider next time is to expand the metadata. We had no column for the type of
photograph – black and white, color, slide, or whatever. Another category could have been
photograph size – 8x10, 5x7 or in metric.
That’s often helpful for a researcher. UNT may do that. I am not that familiar with their metadata
schema and how much if anything they add to what is sent to them. I guess I need to find that out.
The last problem I see is an ongoing one. I have mentioned this in other
posts. How do you choose the
photographs to digitize objectively? I still don’t have an answer for that
one. Portraits are the most
difficult. They are already on
line in the yearbooks so if you have a date and name you can find someone’s
photograph. Often the scanned
yearbook or newspaper image is not that high a quality so that may be one reason to
digitize the portrait separately.
I guess what concerns me most is that not every faculty and staff at the
university had photographs in the archives. Actually it was pretty haphazard. For example, the seventies and the nineties were fairly well
represented, but not the eighties or the earlier years. The university or any creator of a
collection needs to impose more order on their collections to avoid this
problem. Like I said before
identify your photographs, date them, and put them in some organizational
scheme. You will make an archivist very happy.
Off to a conference next week.
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