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.


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