Month: August 2017

Hello all!

This week, while working on uploading more of my items to
the Claremont Colleges Digital Library (CCDL), we have also been working on
creating an online social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Right now, we have our Facebook page up and running, which
will function as the main hub for information about the project. We will
announce updates and events there. Other project partners will contribute to
this page as well. The Claremont Colleges Library’s Twitter and Instagram will
be hosting the CLIR CCEP’s point of view of the project, and all posts we specifically
make will be tagged with #CLIRWater.

I have been helping with this endeavor, and it has forced me
to have to rethink how we use social media. How I use social media personally
differs with how we use social media for a professional project. We have to be
concise, specific, and efficient with how we advertise the project. We want our
patrons to know what we’re working on and why it matters, but we also have to
figure out how to balance social media updates with continuing our digitization
project.

Here are the links to the various social media sites:

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Hi folks! In my original blog post all the way back in April 2017, I talked about scanning Samuel B. Morris’s “Report submitted by Pasadena Water Department to Federal Investigating Committee at hearing com. 2-24-26 re: San Gabriel Canyon Rs of W.”

That report has finally been digitized and uploaded. You can read it here.

And what of my second post, you probably weren’t asking but I’ll tell you anyway, about Frederick Cecil Finkle’s “Report on Victor Valley Irrigation District, San Bernardino County, California”?

Good news, hypothetical reader who’s really into 1920s Victor Valley irrigation! That’s been uploaded as well.

And whatever became of those Willis S. Jones field notes (last one, I swear)?

Now you too can experience the joy of reading Willis S. Jones’s field notes from the comfort of your home.

And with that, my CCEPS work is finished. But this project isn’t! There will be new fellows continuing this work, so keep an eye out for their posts.

Bye folks!

Hi folks! I’ve spent most of this week cropping images, so there isn’t much of interest to report. In the meantime, here are some images I took a few weeks back of an exhibit at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

This week, I have finished managing and inputting my
metadata for items. I scanned 100 items this summer! I thought there would be
more items, but some items had more individual pages that needed scanning (a
few items are over a hundred pages long), so it felt like I had processed more.

Nonetheless, working through this has taken several weeks,
as this is my first time coming up with metadata in an archival setting. This
process has required reviewing the scanned items’ pdfs for content and context
in order to write information for the “description” and “subject” fields. It
requires searching through the Library of Congress authorities for controlled
subject vocabulary, which helps archives patrons to find related items faster. As
I’ve mentioned in the past, this requires being efficient, concise, but also
clear. We do not want to mislead our patrons. We want to make sure our patrons
are given the correct information. I have had to be meticulous to make sure I’m typing everything into CONTENTdm correctly (the syntax for fields has to be correct). 

Once I have input the other necessary information for an item’s metadata, I upload the items. Here’s a screenshot of what that looks like. Sometimes it’s fast if the items are small, and sometimes it takes several minutes for just one item if it’s a larger pdf.     

From here, any new subject terms (such as local figures or regions) are added to the pool of controlled vocabulary available to us. Then, the items are approved. 

The process gets faster once you become familiar with the steps. Metadata is an intensive, focused step in the process of digitizing items, but an important one at that. 

Till next time!

Hello all!

This week here at CCEPS, I have been working on metadata and file converting. I won’t try and jazz up either of these two topics, but they’re very important steps in the digitization process.

We have to convert all of the PDF files of scanned items into PDF/A files. This requires the usual attention to detail and patience, as sometimes it takes awhile for the file to convert fully, especially if the document is huge.

In the meantime, I am almost finished writing up the metadata for all of my items. Having scanned hundreds and hundreds of pages of items and taken at least a dozen photographs, you would think I would have hundreds of items ready to be uploaded once I finish my metadata. It’s actually a lot less, once you realize that the items are all uniquely contained sets. I have 99 items, not quite a hundred, but close enough! Most of my items are related to the Imperial Valley Records, but I have a few items that are unrelated reports.

On top of working on the behind the scenes aspects of digitization, we have started talks about how the CLIRWater project will promote itself to the public through social media. It sounds like we will be making a Facebook page in the coming week. I haven’t used Facebook in close to ten years, so figuring out what people even use the site for these days has required research. Never thought I would be doing research on social media, but there is an art to this kind of professional promotion. As I described last week, each social media site has a different purpose and appeals to a different demographic. Facebook has it’s own audience and appeals to a different kind of posting style. I just have to figure out what that is for 2017.

Till next week!