meta-data: Western Waters update

[Carol Hixson <chixson@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

http://libweb.uoregon.edu/catdept/digcol/wwdl/index.html

There are currently 47 items in Western Waters, a mixture
of images and documents. Lesli and Normandy selected
the images and Lesli and her students did the scanning.
I then uploaded the images and did most of the descriptions,
with Harriett's assistance. Corey did the technical metadata.
Describing these images presented some real challenges
since we had less information about what the images were
than we did for the other collections and it required doing a
fair amount of research on the Web and in print reference
sources to come up with useful descriptions.

For the documents, I identified some "low-hanging"
fruit, i.e. short documents in the public domain, had
one of my staff photocopy them, and then Corey
experimented with the scanning, OCR, and building
of single and compound objects within CONTENTdm.
Corey did the technical and descriptive metadata.
Since we did this work fairly quickly in order to be
ready for a presentation to the Deans Council last
month, we will need to go back and review some of
our work and document our decisions and procedures
better so that we can involve more staff.

The selection team (consisting of me, James, Lesli,
Barbara Jenkins, Tom Stave, Jon Jablonski, and
Professor Dennis Todd) have met twice, the second
time this week to come up with a plan for reviewing
the suggested items and prioritizing them.  Smaller
selection groups based largely on format will be making
decisions about priority items.

The selection group also provided me and Corey
with some feedback on the site. Corey and I have
both developed this web site, recognizing that it
has a lot of work to be done on it. Many of the same
features used in the other collections will be used here.
We spoke specifically about having a page that would
allow focused searching by format, such as maps, articles,
books, images, etc.

I have had a brief conversation with Tom Matney about
including clips from the Roll on Columbia video in this collection.

I have also met with the former Director of the Center for
Columbia River History and got some very useful feedback
and suggestions from him. I have also had some discussions
with staff at some regional policy groups about the collection.

Jon Jablonski has done a lot of work trying to develop an
approach to getting useful maps loaded into the collection. We
are currently pursuing the model of using CONTENTdm as a
discovery tool for maps, perhaps pointing out to a more viable
software interface for presentation. A compromise position
between small jepgs and full resolution images with a huge
file size is being pursued. CONTENTdm is rumored'
to be considering integrating JPEG2000 into a future release,
which would allow us to have better resolution images without
the huge files. Lots of work to be done in this area.

Deb alerted me to the fact that GWLA is contemplating a third
year of the grant to focus on legal materials and I've got a
meeting set up with Dennis Hyatt, Joni  Herbst and Andrea
Coffman to get a head start on that aspect.

I have participated in a couple of conference calls with GWLA
about the collection and have another one next week to
discuss metadata issues specifically. I have been working
with GWLA to get them to start harvesting from our site so that
our materials will start to appear in the shared database at:
http://www.westernwater.org/  GWLA is hiring a professional
firm to develop their web site.

There will soon be more to discuss about this collection because
it is taking us in so many directions at once.

Professor Todd and I have been discussing using this collection
as a focus for honors college theses, from the standpoint of
helping to develop some supporting background information.

Carol