Week 3: Meetings

This week consisted of many meetings. On Monday, Joanna, Jen and I met with Sue Julich to learn about Archon, an open-source program for delivering finding aids online in EAD. Sue showed us the basics of the program, and Joanna and I later spent time exploring it ourselves. We plugged in some legacy (i.e. old) finding aids to see how it worked. The nice thing about the software is that you don't have to actually write any EAD code yourself, but can copy and paste text into boxes with the appropriate headers and an EAD document is automatically created. The downside to this might be a lack of control, and that's something we'll have to evaluate as we assess the program further.

We also had meetings with David McCartney from University Archives and Janet Weaver from the Iowa Women's Archives. Like our meeting with Greg Prickman, our purpose was to learn about the current state of finding aids and the typical workflow in those units. The upshot is that all of them have their finding aids available online as static HTML pages. The format and means of processing them differ somewhat from unit to unit, but there don't seem to be any major differences beyond that.

Finally, I spent more time researching EAD to get a firmer grasp on how it is structured and what the different tags mean. I still have a ways to go on that front, as the tag library is quite large. I also took notes from the book "Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts" by Kathleen Roe, to get a clearer understanding of terminology used in the archives world (fonds, series, manuscript vs. record group, etc.) that may be useful for learning EAD.

Next week, there's a data migration meeting planned with Wendy Robertson on Monday. Aside from that I plan to continue doing research, working with Archon, and playing around with EAD tags. Over the weekend, I'll be attending a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) workshop at the University of Illinois. TEI is a markup language similar to EAD. Hopefully, learning it will prove to be very helpful for this project.

Week 2: The Fog is Lifting

While the first round of articles I read last week were definitely a bit over my head, I feel I am starting to understand better the whole concept of EAD and how it works. I generally need to try something out in order to really grasp it, so the time I spent yesterday actually working with an EAD document was pretty helpful. Jen had Joanna and I copy an EAD template online from a finding aid for a collection at the UC Irvine libraries, and replace the content with elements from Iowa Women's Archives finding aids. It was good practice, and helped me see how an EAD document is structured and how it relates to an HTML finding aid. I could only get so far with the document because the UC and UI finding aids were structured differently enough that they appeared to be only partially translatable. I also didn't understand what all the tags meant. There's still a steep learning curve to overcome, but it has gotten a little less intimidating.

On Thursday, Joanna, Jen and I had a meeting with Greg Prickman from Special Collections. The purpose was to assess the scope and format of finding aids currently being used in that department, to give us a clearer idea of what we'll be dealing with in planning the EAD migration. Joanna and I prepared a set of questions about the collections and how they are described. We learned that there are approximately 2,000 finding aids, and that they are all in HTML created from a standard template. This is good news, as it should make the creation of EAD records easier.

We will also schedule meetings with representatives from University Archives and the Iowa Women's Archive to learn about their collections. Next week, we will revisit the EAD templates we started; meet with Sue Julich to get an introduction to Archon, an archival information system; and continue doing research.

Week 1 (2.0): New Semester, New Project

After finishing up the recipe pamphlet digital collection over winter break, and taking a much-needed breather from school, I'm gearing up to start a brand new project this semester. And I have a partner! Joanna Lee and I are going to be working together on the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) pilot collection. I will again be working in Digital Library Services, with Jen Wolfe and Sue Julich as project mentors.

For any non-library types in the audience, EAD is an XML markup language that enables encoding of archival finding aids into records that are platform-independent, machine-readable, and fully searchable. In other words, it will allow users to search across various online indexes of archival collections, which are currently not standardized.

This project should prove to be fairly different from the previous one, as it will involve figuring out how to implement a new process that isn't yet in place. This will require researching how other institutions have used EAD and determining the best way to begin using it at the U of I Libraries. As I understand it, the end goal is to produce a prototype EAD collection on which to base future migration of HTML finding aids.

Our first assignment from Jen has been to research EAD and find case studies discussing its integration into other institutions' collections. We are looking at online resources and reading articles from LIS journals. On Monday, we'll be meeting with her to discuss what we've learned. The next step will be to start analyzing other EAD sites on the Web.

Week 15: Wrapping Up

This week I wrapped up the web interface design, except for one feature on the home page allowing users to search pamphlets by category. That probably won't be active until all the pamphlets have been added. But other than that, everything is basically done. I got feedback from Sid in Special Collections, and made some adjustments based on his suggestions. I've gotten positive responses from everyone I've shown the design to, and I am very happy with the end product. I was lucky to have a good web designer to work with, as I couldn't have made it look nearly as good on my own. Thanks Linda!

I also began receiving some assistance from Bobby, the DLS library assistant, who has started scanning and cropping pamphlets for me to upload and catalog. This saves a lot of time on my end and will enable me to expand the collection size considerably. The help is greatly appreciated. Bobby will continue where I left off when I finish my stint on the project, so I went over with him my criteria for selecting pamphlets and showed him where they are located in Special Collections. Since I've only had time to look through maybe half the boxes containing pamphlets, I will leave him a list so he knows which ones to focus on after I'm gone.

I didn't get around to working on my presentation for finals week, so I'll start that next week in addition to continuing with production.

Week 14: Lots of Editing

I didn't post last week because of Thanksgiving break. I did, however, go into DLS Monday through Wednesday afternoons and work on production. This week, I focused mainly on editing both web page text and metadata. I re-tooled my essay to include links to pamphlets in the digital collection, to illustrate the main points of the text. I think it helps strengthen the historical analysis and make the essay more relevant and interesting to read.

I also went over the metadata for all the pamphlets I've digitized so far, and made some adjustments. Looking at the metadata I created at the beginning of the project with fresh eyes, hit home for me how subjective the process can be. There's a lot of wiggle room for making judgments about how to catalog things, and it's still somewhat elusive to me. But I've definitely learned a lot from being forced to do it on the fly. I'm looking forward to taking a cataloging class to get a firmer grasp on it.

Linda and I continued to work on the web interface. It's really coming along, and I'm happy with how it looks. I plan to show it to the content providers (Sid and David in Special Collections) next week, and see if there are any changes they'd like to make.

I also heard from Nicki that there is a possibility DLS may be able to provide some extra scanning resources for the project. This would be great, as there are many pamphlets I would love to add but wouldn't have time to scan myself. I am already planning to do production work over winter break to increase the size of the collection, so hopefully this means I will end up with at least 50 pamphlets (I'm currently at 41).

Next week, I plan to wrap up the main aspects of the web interface design, start preparing for the public presentation of fellowship projects on the 19th, and do as much production work as possible.

Week 12: Lots of Writing

My major task this week was composing the webpage text. I started out with a 2-paragraph introduction for the homepage, briefly explaining who Louis Szathmary was, what the recipe pamphlet collection entails, and the scope of the digital collection. This was the easy part. For the "value-added" aspect of the collection, I culled what I considered to be the most relevant information from my research into food history and composed an 8-paragraph essay, which will be on a linked page. It touches on the major factors that influenced the shift in the American diet between 1880 - 1930: advances in agriculture and technology; the emergence of "Food Science" and food purity laws; advertising; and social trends.

There is so much information surrounding this topic, that it's difficult to know where to draw the line. The text needs to give complete and accurate information, while not being so long and detailed that the reader loses interest. Writing the essay is also a challenge because I am by no means an expert on the subject, so I can only hope I'm doing it justice based on the limited amount of research I've had time for. Since I'm doing a fairly broad overview, I think I'll be able to avoid making any obvious errors -- at least, nothing anyone other than a food historian would notice!

Linda gave me a look at the webpage with the first draft of text inserted, and it seemed like it might be a bit too long. I'm working on editing it for brevity and will continue to do revisions in the coming weeks. I will also start drafting a project continuation plan to present to DLS at the end of the semester, outlining steps to be taken to complete the project after I've finished my part. And of course, I will continue with production work.

Week 11: More Of The Same

This week, Linda sent me a link to a preliminary design for the collection homepage. I thought it looked great and was happy to see my ideas manifested on the screen. I won't reveal it until the unveiling of the collection though. I'm sure there will be changes made in the meantime.

One change I'm already considering is to replace the historical timeline with an essay. When I started working on the first draft of the text, it began to seem like an essay would be a better format as it would allow me to better integrate factual information with analysis. I plan to get that to Linda this week so she can incorporate it into the web design. I'm sure I will continue to revise and edit it over the next month, but it will be helpful for this process to be able see how the text fits in with the graphical interface.

Other than that, I did more production work. I think I've uploaded 32 documents now. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll meet my target of 50 after all.

I also spent some time reading about XML and learning how to use the Oxygen editor, since I missed our last seminar and hadn't gotten the in-class tutorial. Knowing basic HTML certainly helps to make sense of XML. I don't claim to have a terribly strong grasp of it yet, but it seems to be a useful tool for data description. Hopefully I will have the opportunity to incorporate it in a future fellowship project, since it is something that I may well need to use someday on the job.