Ian's Digital Weblog

Chris and I made progress on setting up the Geosciences collection. On Tuesday, we met with Mark to go over, to the best of his knowledge, what the Geoscience project would entail. Chris introduced me to some of the basics of migrating images into ContentDM. On Wednesday, we met with Tiffany Adrain who filled us in on some of the history of the slides and Brian Glenister, who has, by all accounts, led a colorful and illustrious life entrenched in the field of geosciences. Tiffany explained that many of the slides were labeled in a fairly non-descript, sometimes arbitrary, fashion. The labels written on the slides by Glenister, such as Category A or B or sometimes a long list of numbers, may or may not have meaning to Glenister, but appear to have been written for purely organizational purposes. Or more exactly put, divided into categories that perhaps only Glenister or a seasoned geologist might understand. Most of the 7,000 have been scanned (a small proportion are attribued to another photographer, but have been approved to be included in the collection) and tagged by the labels Glenister provided. Mark and Tiffany discussed which categories of metadata might be most appropriate, although considering the size of the collection, expediency might take some precedence over quality. Tiffany said she was in the process of hiring a student to assist with the development of more detailed (and hopefully more meaningful) metadata and was planning to set up regular (possibly weekly) meetings to begin going over the slides with Glenister. In the meantime, Chris and I began the process of automating the resizing of images for the collection. On Friday, we met with Ellen, who in lieu of metadata librarian Jen Wolfe, gave us some standardized metadata categories to work with. Tiffany emailed us back on Friday, asking us if we were free to meet with Dr. Glenister on Wednesday. Despite having only scratched the surfaced of this no doubt considerable collection, I'm really looking foward to meeting the man behind the photos. I imagine he has some interesting stories to tell.