September 27th & 28th - On the necessity of finding aids versus spreadsheets

This week I took a look at the Word finding aid that Sheila and Regina have been maintaining. So far, it covers 27 pages of the first scrapbook. However, if the ultimate intention is to upload a metadata spreadsheet and the digital images to LOUIS (LDL) , I personally feel that a finding aid is redundant and labor intensive in a non-traditional archives setting such as the NOMA art library; if nothing else, I am not sure it is the best use of metadata-experienced interns' time working on the project if CONTENTdm and Internet accessibility is the ultimate goal. I asked Sheila about the motivations behind doing both the spreadsheet and the scrapbook. The finding aids were to facilitate finding ability in the scrapbook contents within the library for researchers, the librarian, and non-LIS oriented volunteers. But now the ultimate goal was to digitize the books and get them on LOUIS/LDL, and then archivally seal the books.

I made the case that with the addition of a few more fields (Description, Author, Subject and Subject Names (should the two be combined?); perhaps others) to our metadata spreadsheets, we would eliminate the need to maintain a finding aid in Word, saving a great deal of time, and really implementing the wonderful facet browsing  capabilities of CONTENTdm through the 'Subjects' field--I personally believe this is one of the strongest aspects of CONTENTdm itself, and it would be integral to finding, say, every article by local critic Ethel Hutson, or every article that mentions the Southern Art League. Sheila gave me the okay to go ahead and add such fields to the sheet, but reminded me that not every intern will have the experience necessary to maintain and understand metadata and fields such as Subject, which will required advanced knowledge of controlled vocabularies (additionally, I plan to create a local controlled vocabulary spreadsheet for very local Subjects that don't exist in major sources like LCSH or AAT). They also may just not be able to comprehend the presentation of information on a metadata spreadsheet as easily as they could the traditionally organized finding aids.

This discussion led us to some related tangents. Searchability of the LOUIS collection through the NOMA website is also important per Sheila. I may need to talk to Seth, NOMA's IT go-to man, about how access to the eventual digital collection will be granted through the NOMA website. I do know that APIs can be formulated to crawl both websites and CONTENTdm collections linked to them, but am not that familiar with how. He might know, so I will try to talk to him about it one day while I am here.

A lagniappe e-mail to Maureen sums up my general ideas about fields to add to the spreadsheet:

"I'm adding a few fields to the SB3 spreadsheet that should minimize the need to develop full finding aids for the scrapbooks. I think collecting all the relevant information in one place for future upload into LOUIS is ideal.

I'm adding the fields "Author", "Subjects", and "Description". I'll develop a document describing what we should do for each field (particularly "Subjects") this Friday and e-mail you, as well as save it in my folder on the desktop. Off the cuff, though, I am thinking "Author" will be the author of the article if known; "Description" will be a short summary of the article, 1-3 sentences; and "Subjects" tentatively will include named persons and art movements mentioned in the articles, if available. I think for the moment all you would want to do on Thursday are the "Author" and "Description" fields. "Subjects" will require us to develop something local for a lot of the persons mentioned, and also to pick a proper vocabulary for other possible subjects such as art movements, mediums, etc.

It will add time to the data entry, but should make it a more interesting task, and will serve our goals for the project well while eliminating a duplication of work within the confines of the project."