Creating metadata

I have a new assignment, to get some hands-on experience. I am working with Wayne Shoaf, who is in charge of metadata for the digital archive here. (Wayne, a horn player who graduated from Oberlin, was once in charge of the Schoenberg collection here. When the collection was moved to Vienna, he had the opportunity to try out the new location for 6 months, after which trial he chose to return to sunny CA.)

One collection that is being "ingested" into the archive is from the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper, photos from the 1950's. The photo negatives have already been scanned and given accession numbers using PixArc software. My job is to find the corresponding descriptive information written on the negative jackets (a student has already photocopied these and put them in a notebook) and enter the information into the database using an ingest form. The ingest form is homegrown, and will eventually be migrated to another based on Documentum. USC is having to do a lot of customization to get Documentum to function as they need it to.

This job is like cataloging, having to make sure the proper fields are present, formats are consistent, and that anticipated user terms will pull up desired records. While I am not coding in XML, I am creating content in metadata fields that have already been defined for this collection.

An interesting consequence of this assignment is learning about newspaper photo collections and Los Angeles history. You see the same phenomena in most cities - burglaries, accidents, fires, abandoned children, etc. But you also see lots of actors and actresses in the news, whether it be posing at a special event or getting a divorce.