As with the rest of my group, my work on the project this week has been to complete entering metadata for the Omeka collection into our inventory. Like Maya and Lauren, I look forward to working on the controlled vocabulary, which I think will provide good backing for recommendations that we make for MITH and LCHP. As I entered more and more data, I wondered about the usefulness of broadly defined Subject headings like “Housing” that are so ubiquitous as to comprise apply to at least half of the records. Like Jenny, I think that my entries will benefit from a second scrubbing to impose consistency and eliminate errors. The current state of the Omeka collection definitely illustrates the importance checking over your work, as well as creating a consistent protocol for preserving metatdata!

Which brings me to my main concern of the week: missing files. I need to check, but out of 746 file, we must have at least 50 missing, which is a big chunk! I think that we need to make a recommendation to LCHP about what to do with ghost records with metadata…but no data. Eliminating them all together means that information contained in the title will be lost. Furthermore, I think that some of the records can still be tracked down. Many of the missing records from my chunk of work have come from the city of College Park; it is entirely possible that they are still accessible for persistent researchers. Some of the oral histories that are missing seem to exist as audio cassettes, perhaps in the possession of LCHP members.  On the other hand, the metadata don’t seem very reliable if there is no record attached to them; how useful can that be? Some of the missing records not only have data missing, but also lack meaningful metadata. Perhaps a contingent approach to records can be applied on an individual basis.Ultimately, this is a decision for LCHP and MITH, but I do think that we have a responsibility to offer an actionable suggestion.

I had originally been skeptical about preserving the contributor/creator metric, but now it’s sort of become the basis of a kind of “naughty or nice” list in my mind. There were definitely some students who were very thorough (although still not consistent) at entering metadata (Hello Jocelyn Knauf and Gregory McCampbell!), while others were…not. I really want to know who the “wilmer” was who entered all of the City of College Park Urban Renewal Authority appraisal photos. They were prolific, so I can’t call them lazy, but the quality control on those documents was extremely spotty, and most of my missing records come from this contributor.