Finishing up… (Practicum Final Project)

This weekend I finished up my practicum project, which included:

• creating minute-by-minute logs for all of the interviews in the series
• writing abstracts for each of the interviews
• choosing appropriate metadata fields, and cross-walking the local cataloging schema to the required DublinCore schema
• subject cataloging and description of the collection, series, and individual items
• entering all data into the batch upload spreadsheet provided by OhioLink, and running the macro action which created XML metadata records for each audio file
• burned all materials to DVD to be sent to OhioLink

Now, we will wait until they are published, which could take up to a of couple weeks depending on current workloads and priorities at OhioLink.  While it is possible to remotely upload items into the DRC, new users are limited to the default metadata fields, which were not sufficient in this case.  In order to use custom fields, we needed to physically give them the files.  Once they are published, those custom fields we used will be available for future projects.  Although this is certainly not an ideal situation, it is not such a big deal either.  I expect that it is a result of the DRC’s relative newness and that the process will be streamlined in the near future.

At this point, I am holding off on further comments about this project, which will be discussed in greater detail on the Project Report page of this site.