Following up on recent discussions about the use of metadata in our Morningside Heights Digital History project, we focused more today on implementation and on practice-based rules and agreements. Elizabeth Davis will be our sole continuing member on the Editorial Team. Fortunately, she has prior editorial experience with W W Norton and a keen eye for the pragmatics of editing.
We arrived at various agreements regarding metadata for items on our project site:
- Persons posting items should do their best to assign each item an appropriate item type and to fill out whichever metadata fields are feasible.
- Elizabeth will review our work, being on the lookout for outliers, and will communicate with contributors as needed.
- In order to enhance our developing consensus on employment of metadata, we should all consult the shared spreadsheet "Objects and metadata model."" In that spreadsheet, one of our catalogers, Melanie Wacker, listed several examples of items that might be represented on our project site and filled out the basic Dublin Core fields for each (title, description, source, creator, etc.).
- We should agree upon and employ a basic list of subject tags for use in this pre-launch phase of the project.
- We have a library intern in Spring 2015 who will be working on enhancing access to our project site. She can look more closely into questions of subject tagging and recommend additions and/or revisions to our group.
