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!
Chris and I were scheduled to met with Tiffany Adrain again this morning to touch base about where we were in terms of metadata. As Mark explained it last week, our job is to look at the metadata in more broad terms, given our lack of geoscience knowledge. Over the course of last week we filled in the metadata categories the best we could, given we were working with a limited number of defined categories like the original labels written by Glenister and some additional classification made explicit by Ms. Adrain. We also made a trip to archives last week to see if we could dig up some background information on Glenister's research, perhaps in the form of articles or training notes. According to David McCartney, university archivist, special collections has some 27 square feet of boxes filled with Glenister material that has yet to be cataloged. Going through the first box of material gave me a better appreciation for the detph and considerable impact Dr. Glenister has had in his respective field. Additionally, the man is seriously well traveled, as indicated by the correspondence that is documented in some of his archive material. I do hope I have a chance to meet with him at some point, if only to get a better sense of who he is. This week Chris and I planning to finish uploading the first batch of slides. Depending on the lag time between finishing that job and when Tiffany sends us more metadata, we may talk to Mark about starting or helping out on another job.
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.
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