Week 3- Oops! All meta data (RICHES guidebook)

 This week aside from setting up appointments with Howard's Librarian and a fellow graduate student for learning how to use the CHDR's large scale scanner this week has been spent looking at the RICHES guide book. This informational book is a hefty 58 page book explaining what RICHES is, how it works and how it does metadata. This includes description of each field (description, subject,type ect.) how it's used and how you need to input the data/information for each field.  

Img.1: the description meta data field with the introduction text explaining what it is, following paragraphs explain how the Library of Congress uses such information to filter search results.

In Dublin core there are 15 elements to consider, some easier than others such as the title of the image or just the description. But when dealing with older items certain things such as the author/creator or publisher can be difficult to find, maybe the author's name got cut out when the news paper clipping was cut for instance.  In the RICHES guide book examples some fields are just left blank but otherwise there is no clear guidance on what gets inputted should a certain field be absent from the item.

While metadata is important and will be much of the work done,what I thought was interesting was that there is a standard size and file format used with digital archiving. The standard PPI (pixels per inch) for all images scanned in is 600ppi, this pixel density is used for the master image to ensure that when the image is transferred over to a smaller format such as PNG or JPG the image retains most of it's quality.  While a simple idea it's just not something that I had considered, I just expected images to be saved as high resolution JPG's. Once the scanning is done you will have a high quality TIF file that is used to created other formats of the images, you then make another version of the images that is a JPG, this being the Archive image.  The reason this is done is simple, large images mean webpages take longer to load and there are limitations on storage space and some websites have size limits on the images that can be uploaded, ones that a TIF file will easily be larger than.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Summer week 1

 This summer semester will be a continuation of last semesters Howard digitization project. This first week there's not much to discuss, sending emails to get things restarted, much of the decisions for this week were done during the last week of last semester. This week I showed the new undergraduate intern the basics of how the capture one software and the titan scanner worked. We redid scans of two of the banners with the hopes that next week we will be able to get these put together with Photoshop automatically by providing more overlap between the images, if this fails we will have to learn how to put the images together manually, which may mean yet another re-scan as if the Photoshop algorithm cant put the images together I have concerns that we wont be able too. We also discovered that some of the materials may well be moved due to construction and reconstruction at the school, this increases the likely-hood that some of the items may be misplaced, or worse, mistook for tras...
Read more

Summer week 2

  This week was used to both redo the banners (yet again) and preview the other materials that were borrowed from Howard before the school all but shut down for construction over the summer. I met with Mike Shier from the CHDR and went over how to manually do the Photoshop combining of banners, the first thing that was apparently is that the algorithm failed to produce a combined images likely because the images couldn’t be aligned i.e manually moving the   images until things lined up still resulted in another part of the image not lining up.   Mike then suggested redoing the images so that there are four takes of the banner instead of the 16 or so that we redid last week, this gives less points of potential failure; after all redoing four images is far easier than redoing 16. However this may come at a slight cost, that being the DPI; the capture one scanner at full height can’t fails to focus when trying a DPI at the 600 minimum that Dublin core wants for the TIFF fi...
Read more

Week 1- Introduction and initial impressions

 I'm Matthew Austin, a second semester graduate student in UCF's Public History program whose areas of interest are labor  and civil rights history. This internship with Howard middle school is a opportunity to get some experience in what public history is, working with groups outside your institution and hopefully helping to tell their story. While at Howard Middle we had the chance to look at some of the scrap books that had been made over the years dating back to the, I think at least, mid-40's; not only does this give us a chance to look at what was important to the individual who made the scrap books but what the Orlando news deemed important enough to be published in the news paper.  My hope with this internship is to gain skills that could be useful in a post graduate job or for other Internships, but also to opportunity to participate in what I would can only describe as a community history project.  While I have doubts we will be able to go through a lot o...
Read more