Week 6, July 20-26

My second deliverable was completed this week, and it is the first series of metadata of my own creation. For the "Historical Materials" section, I had three different tabs in my spreadsheet because each series of resources had specific metadata different from the other resources in its section. While the "Indian Wars" and "Civil War" subpages had little material, by the time I reached World War 2, there was a vast expanse of documentation that posed unique challenges. Sometimes this made the going a bit slow, but never boring. If one is to use this material for research, as a primary resource there is much to delve into. This is especially true if one is interested in the trials of war criminals from Nazi Germany or the Japanese empire.

One of the greater challenges with some of the materials is that there wasn't a truly definitive writer or publisher. Sometimes it was a just an organization responsible for the report. I would use the name of this organization as the contributor/writer AND publisher. Also, one of the pieces of metadata I used for this section was "Dates". This is because often there were multiple dates within a resource that played an important role. The same could be said for "Locations Mentioned." For example, if there is a document about a massacre during World War 2 and a subsequent trial, the location of the massacre and the trial are both important, so they were each given weight as an article of metadata. All in all, I spent a lot of time browsing documents looking for keywords that would be relevant to use. For me, that has been an approach where quality data input supersedes quantity of resources added into the spreadsheet.

With four weeks to go, I am in a solid position to continue to sharpen my skills with Microsoft Excel. However, now that this deliverable is finished, I am going to broaden my scope and work with OpenRefine. The reason for this is because it never hurts to have another tool in your bag to work with, or in artist parlance, the broader the color palette the more shades you have to paint a picture. Stay tuned for next week as I will talk about my experience with a new program!

Week 5, July 13-19

As of now I am knee deep into the World War 2 section of the "Historical Materials and Military Regulations" part of the collections. From a subjects/keyword standpoint, there is a vast array of material that encompasses crimes of war from American soldiers to the Nuremberg trials, and much more. This has allowed me to do some external research for the purpose of finding keywords that may have been used by other databases on the same material, or coming up keywords myself. The challenge behind doing the former is finding something not too specific, but also not too general. At times I have put myself into the shoes of a researcher not knowing exactly what they are looking for, but they have a subject in mind. This role-playing has been a creative way with coming up with keywords that could allow a searcher to stumble into these documents and have them be a relevant find.

Another real challenge I faced was devising a metadata schema. Each category within the "Historical Materials and Military Regulations" had unique and specific metadata particular to them and them alone. In order to classify them correctly, each spreadsheet was tailored for them so as to do justice to the data contained in each. Some may think this is tedious, but the information exemplifies the character of these resources, so that the individuality allows for redundancy to never set-in. Looking ahead, there will be more WW2 material. If I can finish it by next blog post, I will silently celebrate. If it isn't finished, I know that I will be in a good position to finish it next week and be ready for the next phase!

Week 4, July 6-12

One door closes, another opens. After spending the last few weeks working on the Lieber Collection, I have now finished what my predecessor started. I was able to add two new tabs to the spreadsheet. The titles of the final two tabs are "Lieber Collection-Other Printed Resources" and "Lieber Collection-Ephemera." The former category consisted of books and articles, primarily. As I worked through this list I had to make some interesting decisions. For one, the last resource on the LLOC website for this category only had one URL but there were over a dozen sources listed with relevant metadata. I could have taken the easy way out, but I decided to input this data in the spreadsheet. This prolonged my completion by a few hours at least. Also, I often referred back to the old LOC website for the Military Legal Sources. Much of the data I used from their submissions were minutiae I submitted into the Note section. For the latter section, "Ephemera," I was able to use resources that are atypical of the what I had worked with before. Whether it was a bookmark, telegram, or a postcard, it allowed me to look at resources in an interesting and new way. If you are interested in checking out my the completed spreadsheet, go to the deliverables page! Here you can find the completed Lieber Collection. Remember, I only began at row 1189 on the first tab.

Now I am moving on to the Historical Materials section. I am looking forward to this next facet of the project!