Ian's Digital Weblog

I'm feeling much more confident about where I stand with my DLS work, or at least better than I was feeling about a week ago. On Monday, Chris and I met with Tiffany Adrain again to discuss our metadata schema. Unfortunately, we weren't able to meet up with Dr. Glenister, who apparently only drops in sporadically to meet with Tiffany. We also finished uploading the first batch of Glenister slides to the Digital Library website. It was really great seeing what the images look like on the site, but perhaps more importantly, it helped me wrap my mind around the sheer enormity of our task. Only 6,900 more slides to go.

Chris and I also talked to Mark about the possibility of starting another project in our downtime, while we wait for Tiffany to send us more metadata. Tiffany had explained she was still in the process of hiring another graduate student to work exclusively on the Glenister slides. Moreover, many of the slides require the tacit expert knowledge that only someone like Tiffany can provide. Thus, what will probably be a regular delay in receiving metadata information. Mark suggested working on the Daily Iowan project, which Chris had worked on over the summer and which comprises over 3 Terra Bytes of digitally scanned newspapers (in Tiff format) dating from the mid-nineteenth century. I'm pretty excited about getting started on this as it is a bit more contiguous to my own interests (I wrote for the student newspaper for some 8 years in high school and college). To begin, we've focused most of our time on cropping the images and changing the format to accommodate OCR (optical character recognition). Chris has been really patient in teaching me the applications for the Daily Iowan project and familiarizing me with the work flow. I'm looking forward to a productive week!