First Day

Yesterday marked the first day of work for me at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. I will be spending two days per week there until my capstone project is completed. At the end of this project, I will have uploaded all of the Wasowski Native Texas Landscape slides to the Wildflower Center's image database, and each image will be accompanied by appropriate metadata.

The Wildflower Center already has an extensive image collection on their website, and for the most part, I will be following the process that they have already tested and agreed upon to complete this project. However, as the Wasowski slides are the first landscape images that the Wildflower Center has acquired, I will be expected to tweak this process to meet my needs and to offer suggestions for improvements that could be made to the process and, in particular, the types of metadata collected.

Melissa, the Wildflower Center's librarian and my field supervisor, having been through this process before, suggested that it would be easier for me to determine an appropriate organization scheme for the images before attempting to scan them. To this end, I spent my first day familiarizing myself with the contents of the four large binders that currently house the slides; developing an organization scheme; and numbering, labeling, and physically rearranging the slides. Melissa left all decisions about how to organize the slides up to me.

There are an estimated 1,700 slides in this collection; however, as I discovered yesterday, nearly two thirds of them appear to be duplicates or near duplicates. In order to make the scanning process as efficient as possible, I elected to remove all duplicates from the original binders and organize them into new binders. Each duplicate was labeled with the number of the slide that it is a copy of. Near duplicates were were labeled with the same number along with an additional identifying character (i.e., a, b, c, etc.) to indicate that, although they were too similar to another slide to be included in the collection, they were in fact distinct images.

Because of the large amount of slides in the collection, as well as the number of duplicates that needed to be verified and organized independently of the originals, I was only able to organize one of the binders yesterday. At the end of the day, I created a spreadsheet to track some of the information about the slides I had already organized (i.e., slide number, file name, orientation, collection, and photographers). My next step will be to scan the slides I have now organized.