Wednesday, December 16, 2015

October 27th -- The value of the 'Description' field

As I dive into filling out the 'Description' field on the metadata spreadsheet, I am given to thinking about what a description can provide to a browsing user. While indexed searching will allow a great deal of discoverability to a user with targeted research goals  (and ideally a full-text search, if NOMA is able to implement OCR for the scrapbook collection someday), a casual browser most likely will only see the description, and not necessarily look at the digital article *unless* something of note pops up in that description. As I write my description for these items, I realize that very bland and generalized summaries might not be the best route for description of the items; that, although we are trying to keep these descriptions very short due to our limited time and manpower resources, it is probably ideal to fill the descriptions with as many of the proper nouns present in each article as possible. I have to keep in mind that sans the full text searching that would have been possible with OCR applied to our articles, the 'Description' and 'Subjects' field are the only searchable fields that will represent the contents of the articles. And with 'Subjects' being a future (and tenuous?) offering, it is doubly important that as much be addressed in the descriptions as possible.


As for MS Paint developments...I found out MS Paint has a crop function, too! I haven't played with this modest little program in ages, so I am thrilled to discover it has the two basic functions we'd normally need Photoshop for on a digitization project like this. There is no image correction, but that's not a necessity for our project as long as all the JPEGs are legible.

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