Day Twenty-four, 915-1115, Total Time = 150 Hours

LAST DAY! All I have to do today is present my project to the people of the Cleveland Memory Project. As it turns out there were three other practicum students that presented today as well. The other students practicum topics were; The Cleveland Browns, the good years, Breweries of Cleveland, and Cleveland Housing. All the presentations were very interesting and I liked listening to what other people were doing. I think that my presentation went well and people seemed interested in what I was doing. I was here for two hours and the meeting took up all of these final hours. I am glad that I had my practicum at CSU. I have had a good experience here and learned many good useful skills.

Day Twenty-three, 915-1600, Total Time = 148 Hours 0 Minutes

I am very close to finishing at the start of today. With that in mind I was able to move quickly through the day and before I knew it the day was over. I finished the metadata and I wanted to be sure that I had created good rich metadata. This took the next couple hours but I feel that it was worth it because I want to produce a good, usable product. After I finished going through the metadata I wrote the text for the front page for the web exhibit for my project. I included possible titles, a short paragraph, and prospective photos to use.

Day Twenty-two, 915-1640, 141 Hours 15 Minutes

There are not too many records to go, I finished 58 today. Half way through the day I emailed Kif to see how my metadata was doing and how many records I had completed. She emailed back that there were 83 live and 24 more in the queue, at that time. After the email I finished 31 more files, that gives me 138 with the target of 150. By the end of today I had finished going through the Cleveland Press photos and I am right on track for the target number. However I will have more because I still have the Bruce Young collection to add metadata. I scanned more photos than I needed and as I was going through doing the metadata I skipped some photos that looked similar to others that I had already done. If there is time I would like to add metadata to these as well. At the end of the day I talked with Bill and he asked how my hours were coming along and it looks as if I will be right on track.

Day Twenty-one, 915-1630, Total Time = 133 Hours 50 Minutes

I was able to find a good rhythm to my metadata today. I completed forty records. I did this because I quit over thinking the subject terms. I went with my initial instinct for the photos and the contextual clues provided by the captions of the photo on their reverse. I think that one of my major problems from the previous week was that I was trying to hard to make the metadata perfect. After letting go of my over thinking I was able to complete more records in one day. I reviewed the records from the other days to make sure that I had not lost any integrity of the records and I feel that I did not. I talked with Bill again today about my progress and it seems that I will be able to finish the project on time.

Day Twenty, 930-1615, Total Time = 126 Hours 35 Minutes

I started the day by talking with Bill about the progress of my project and he had some questions about other metadata platforms. I told him that I had experience using dSpace from another class and he grilled me on the program. I told him that I thought it was a good platform but it had some problems with usability, but overall it was a good program to use. After talking with Bill I started back in with my metadata. I was able to get through 23 records but I need to pick up the pace, without lowering the integrity of my metadata, if I am going to finish the project. In my metadata I added a "see also" element to link the Akron project in Cleve. Memory. directly to Summit Memory. Since Akron is in Summit I feel there needs to be a direct link to Summit Memory instead of the user looking through Ohio Heritage North East. The Multi Site Server is useful but I want users to be able to link directly to the Summit Memory. While doing this "see also" I thought of looking up the direct search URL, i.e. Firestone, and putting that URL in the "see also", but that creates a very long link. I emailed Bill to get his input and he suggested tiny URL and he emailed Kif to get her input as well. Kif felt that I could use the tiny URL, the www.summitmemory.org, or the long URL and it would not make much difference. I looked through the Summit Memory site and found that some pictures, bridges, were not in their collection. I felt that having some long URLs for topics like Firestone and the site URL for others would not be very synchronous. In the end I decided to go simple and the user can go directly to Summit Memory, from the metadata, and search the Summit collection from there.

Day Ninteen, 930-1615, Total time = 119 Hours 50 Minutes

Today marked the final stage of my project; metadata. I meet with Kif in digital production and she took me through using ContentDM and the different aspects of the metadata elements that the Cleveland Memory project uses. The elements are very similar to Dublin Core and I found it very easy to understand. I feel this way because I have an understanding of DC before I began the project. Kif also went over some of the rules that Cleveland Memory uses for the sake of consistency. She gave me a guide to follow for coming up with picture titles, descriptions, etc. Something that we discussed was the fact that Clev. Mem. is geared toward Cleveland and that the controlled vocabulary for the subject terms will not always fit into Akron, i.e. Seiberlings, Akron Children’s Hospital, to name a few. I decided to enter the subject terms that were not in the controlled vocabulary and see if they could be added later. After submitting a few records I emailed Kif to see how everything was going with the metadata. She said that it looked good and she added the subject terms to the controlled vocabulary list.

Another thing that Kif and I discussed was the location of the items within Akron, i.e. neighborhoods. She had pulled up a map of Akron with the neighborhoods and said that she could add them if I wanted to use them, I felt to be accurate that I should use the neighborhoods of Akron because everything is not found downtown. A good example is the Airdock. It is located in the Ellet neighborhood and I felt that it deserved to be listed as such because if a user was searching for photos of Ellet they do not want to sift through hundreds of pictures of Akron to get to the one neighborhood. With that being said Kif added the neighborhoods to the location controlled vocabulary. Since this was my first day of metadata I was cautious and went very slowly. I was able to record 20 items.

Day Eighteen, 915-1530, Total Time = 113 Hours 5 Minutes

Yesterday's word of the day carried over to today. I spent today scanning again. This is starting to consume too much time. I talked with Bill about my progress in the project and mentioned that I had scanned about 170 photos up to this point. He asked if I had more photos and if I do to have someone in digital production scan the rest. I did have a few left, so I took the remaining photos upstairs for DP to take care of for me. Bill had expressed that I may have too many photos. I explained that I feel the same way, but I have a plan. As I am going through and entering the metadata, I will be even more selective and pick the upper eschelone of photos to tell the Akron story. Then, depending on how much time that takes, the photos that did not make the first cut will be added on a second cut. He liked this plan and hopefully next week I will be able to stick with it.