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.
