Sunday, March 30, 2008

Week 7: Fun With Photoshop

Joanna and I got really burned out on encoding. I worked on my Louis Noun finding aid on and off for weeks, and am still only halfway through it because the container lists take FOREVER to mark up by hand. Therefore, we took a break from that last week to work on other neglected tasks.

Specifically, we're focusing on designing the interface that will allow users to search and browse the finding aids. This will include simple keyword and advanced searching, as well as browsing by topic, subject, creator, collection title, collection date, and form/genre. We came up with a list of topical categories for browsing, and worked on mapping EAD elements to MARC record codes for controlled access elements.

We also created a screen shot in Photoshop. It was fun to do something purely creative for a change, but we seemed to be barking up the wrong tree (we were sure Jen would be blown away by our idea to use expandable boxes rather than drop-down menus, but she politely nixed that), so we'll be going back and overhauling the whole thing. That's ok though, because it's an iterative process, as we learned in seminar last semester.

Our next goal is to complete a sample set of finding aids from the three collections (ignoring the container lists for now), and bring those along with our search page ideas to a meeting with Sue and Bryan at the end of the week. They will be responsible for the actual programming, so we'd like to give them something to work with ASAP.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Week 6: Markup Madness

This post will be relatively short because I already wrote it once, after which it was immediately lost to the Internet ether when Blogger went down briefly (and didn't auto save my draft! Bad Blogger!). Here's a quick recap.

My main task this week was to continue encoding a sample finding aid in EAD using the oXygen text editor. Joanna and I each chose f.a.'s from the Iowa Women's Archive to mark up separately, after which we will compare notes and try to come up with an EAD template that can be used for all future finding aids. The next step after that will be to figure out how to plug the template into Archon.

The encoding has been a slow process, because we're using EAD samples we've found online to guide us and they're all a little different. Thus, there is a lot of revision and backtracking as we go. We've learned that EAD is pretty flexible and provides a lot of room for customization. At the same time, this can make it seem somewhat ambiguous and confusing. But I feel I'm making definite progress, and am learning a lot by getting my hands dirty with the actual encoding.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Weeks 4 & 5: Field Trip

Oops. I forgot to post last week because all of us DLS fellows were immersed in the TEI at UIUC. The two-day workshop was intensive and kind of exhausting, but it was relevant to my project and helpful for understanding the text encoding process better. We learned how to use the Oxygen text editor, which will carry over to my work with EAD. And having experience with XML-based markup languages will be useful in general, so it was worth the trip.

To backtrack a bit, the week previous to the workshop Joanna and I had meetings with Wendy Robertson and John Osborn. Wendy discussed strategies for batch migration of legacy finding aids, and we spent most of the rest of the week playing around with that. The process we're testing involves creating tab-delimited text files of the finding aids, plugging them into an Excel spreadsheet, and figuring out how to make the various headings match up. This is easy if the finding aids have a consistent format, but not so easy otherwise. It's very time consuming to get the formatting right, so I'm not sure this method will work for all of the finding aids. We definitely have more work to do to figure it out.

We also talked with John Osborn from ITS about streamlining the process using some form of programming script. He's working on a template script for migrating the finding aids into Archon. Honestly, I'm not clear on this method yet, but hopefully will understand it better as we work on it more.

This week, Joanna and I continued working on the Excel spreadsheets and also practiced marking up finding aids in Oxygen. I'm not sure what else may be in store for next week, but will find out when we have a check-in meeting with Jen on Monday.