October 23rd & 26th - Metadata and hacks

I finally had a chance to work on the metadata spreadsheet again for the first time in a few weeks prior to the Art Department meeting. I started filling information in the 'Descriptions' field for the first time since adding it to the spreadsheet(although Maureen has been working on it steadily). This is a somewhat funny activity when dealing with newspaper articles--often the headline is the perfect summary! However the style is not particularly DACS or any other standard-appropriate, so we still need to write the descriptions in. Repeated subjects (such as people and common associations and groups) become important to us that may not have been important enough to the original authors to use in the headlines, so we have a chance to include them in our short descriptions.


While I usually do not note much from the Art Department meetings, today one of the curators who had recently visited the Denver museum noted that their funding, presentation, and collections are nearly on par with places like New York and Chicago! Good to know--if I ever make it out there I'll have to go. Also of note was that Piction was almost ready to go to beta for everyone to test. I hope the library and the scrapbooks can be tested in it during a future phase, in case LDL does not remain an option.


A small development in scanning procedure also occurred. As plagued as I am by the management of the paper we use to cover up unwanted items when scanning, my searching mind finally came up with a potential alternative when faced with a particularly gnarly paste job of articles in the scrapbooks. Basically, I was presented with an irregular article that had a small article pasted directly into one of its cavities. This proved a nightmare (if not justifiably prohibitive) to cover up with paper pieces. Seeing as Photoshop will not be an option for us, I had a 'eureka!' moment with MS Paint: instead of fussing with paper, why not open the JPEG in MS Paint and cover up the unwanted stuff with plain white squares? They're more uniform and easier to control than physical paper. I did just that and it was a dream. I might just eliminate worrying with any paper cover-up at all  in favor of doing this before cropping in MS Office Picture Manager.


My result, no paper fussing involved:

This is MUCH faster than fooling with paper.