A Quiet Week

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!