May 21, 2013 - "Point Insertion"

Today marked my first day as a digitization assistant.

I arrived before Sara did, and she provided me with a link to learn about and download Google Refine, a tool aimed towards easily managing messy data into tables. When she arrived, we visited the archives office, and I was assigned a photograph to digitize (but was sadly already digitized). Then, Sara had me take some time to figure out Google Refine, so I could organize the Senior Theses of the Art History department into neat tables without having to do a lot of copy and pasting. I couldn't figure out how to use Google Refine to organize this particular set of data easily, so I had to use excel and organize manually, but Refine still helped me delete redundant information once I had it neatly organized into tables.

Then, I began a short project of 27 photographs dubbed the "Helen Pearce Collection". I scanned, edited, and added metadata to every photograph, though there is still some metadata that needs to be added.

With regard to metadata, I had some formatting questions as well as how I should input the data into the File Info for photographs. For example, where do I put dates? For the 27 photos, I titled the source "Helen Pearce Collection circa 1935-1955", but I'm not sure if this is correct. I also am curious what kind of descriptors I should use other than the name of the building(s).

Tomorrow, I need to wrap up the Helen Pearce Collection and get started on either the Vernor Sackett collection or whatever other project comes my way.