This week I spent a lot of time reading about metadata practices and taking notes so that I can prepare myself for creating metadata for the digital surrogates that I have created these past six weeks. Dublin Core and Non-Dublin Core elements as well as a data dictionary created by the digital library staff have been my best friends this week. Before I start reading through my digital surrogates in order to gather keywords and create descriptions, I have been gathering property data such as format and size information and creating Microsoft word documents in order to organize the data. Next week I plan on summarizing the context of the digital surrogates and reviewing Library of Congress Name Authorities. My “biggest” challenge would be converting our tif files into the pdfs that they accompany. Our tif files are of the oversized documents that we could not fit onto a scanner for their digital production (I talk more about them in Blog Entry 003; Photography and Photoshop). One part about metadata that I find interesting is the organized attention to detail; the most vital part about a digital surrogate is its metadata because the metadata is the key to the discovery and utilization of the digital surrogate. Although the process may seem meticulous, I appreciate its purpose.