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.
