I have now catalogued the metadata in Airtable for my quarter (186) of the 746 Omeka records, in time for our self-imposed deadline of tomorrow. Along the way I have found that in several records, for some reason particularly ones describing JPEGs, there are file descriptions, but the file itself is not attached. Hopefully MITH, or someone at least, still has these files on one of the 3 hard drives associated with this project, since they don’t seem to be on the Omeka servers.

These records in particular, unsurprisingly, have especially poor metadata, which is both sparse as well as rife with spelling and grammatical errors and inconsistent capitalization and punctuation. These were lower-numbered records, so they seem to be among the earliest inputted (but among the last I catalogued because the Omeka pages work backward from most recently inputted), and an Omeka learning curve could help explain some of these errors. We’re awaiting access to the admin side of the Omeka site so we can have more context to understand the file and record inputting process.

Fortunately, most of the records are indeed attached to files, with varying levels of metadata that are interesting to analyze. I can definitely see the value of our controlled vocabularies in organizing and standardizing the metadata, and our inventory in helping MITH assess how much overlap there is between their hard drives and the Omeka site and fill in any gaps. But I wish we had more time for this part of the project! Now we prepare to move on to writing the contributor guide, which I don’t think I will enjoy as much as I’ve enjoyed cataloging and learning about the people and history of Lakeland!