Weekly projects

Last week's projects:

• Troubleshooting streaming video for the project (final result here). I’m not happy with the display of the metadata for the individual items. The user must click on the part that they want information for, and then choose page description from the dropdown list. Why would a normal user associate “page description” with a description of a video clip? I think most users will just view the item without seeing the metadata we’ve created.

• Learning how to creating structural metadata for books with chapters (example). This was one of my jobs at Harvard, and we used a program by CCS called docWORKS. It performed OCR, automatically created structural metadata (with human assistance), and exported a METS file. This was much quicker and easier than determining how to create the directory structure for ContentDM, and renaming all of the files to coincide with how we want them displayed.
  

• Working on my first-year tenure review documentation (due tomorrow!!!).

Other thoughts:

A new wiki for digitization issues was released. This has the potential to be of great use to me as I’m learning all about digitization of various formats.

On a more personal level, I met with the flute professor at ISU this week to discuss how to become more involved with the flute community in the area. With so much invested in my flute background, I’m really hoping to be able to continue performing. Of course, this is even more difficult than learning how to do a new job, and doing both at the same time is overwhelming.

The online edition of the Terre Haute Tribune-Star mentioned my blog several weeks ago. Unfortunately I didn’t find it until they had removed the page (I found it in the Google cache). Following is the review:

“How I metalibrarian ...

Blogging to "help with her own professional development and to organize helpful information" is Amy Jackson, the new Metadata and Digitial Initiatives Librarian (or metalibrarian, as she calls her blog) at Indiana State University.

She is involved with a project the Tribune-Star and tribstar.com recently featured on its unveiling -- the Wabash Valley Visions and Voices digital memory project, a collaborative effort by many groups in the Valley to preserve the region's history and heritage in print, pictures and sound.

She has but a few entries in her metalibrarian blog to date, but data and history buffs could gain some interesting insights into the WV3 project as it continues to develop.”