This week Zach and I went in to Joe’s to confer with Sierra and finalize the keyword taxonomy our team has been developing for them. We then imported it into Bridge on each of their workstations, so that they are all working with an identical set of keywords. Our hope is that this will function as a bit of a controlled vocabulary for recurring categories of metadata. Of course keywords are a rather fluid area of metadata and do not retain any hierarchical structure, but if this helps them maintain consistency then Creative Works will be a step ahead when they finally get to the stage of implementing the “digital museum” that is their ultimate goal.

We then addressed the topic of folder structure of in-progress work files. This discussion – and its related tangents – was quite fruitful. We were able to dive deeper on many points that our group previously had questions about, including their current hardware environment, the challenges it presented, how it effected workflow and file organization, and what an ideal hardware environment would look like for them. We also briefly touched on the concept of establishing a schedule of archiving tasks that maps to the timeline of each semester. For example, this schedule could:

• Carve out time the week prior to the start of classes for preparing workstations with a fresh template of benchmark folders for students to populate.
• Establish regular intervals during the semester for identifying portfolio quality work.
• Set aside time at the end of each semester for applying any final metadata and migrating student assets to a more permanent repository.

I feel like we’re getting close to the end of what we can physically do for Joe’s. We have provided them with the basic tools, but they are ultimately the ones that have to identify their content and make decisions about it. Most of the retroactive curation challenge for them now rests in knowing the “aboutness” of their files, and as a group we just don’t know what we’re looking at, so we’re ill-suited to apply metadata or make “keep vs toss” decisions…  well, at least decisions that aren’t obvious, like duplicates. I think the remainder of the value we provide to Joe’s will be in documenting many of the processes and standards we have established so that they have easy reference material for replicating these practices on their own for all future work. I hope to turn my attention to that this coming week.