I'm finally wrapping up this project! I have now accessioned more than 500 of the images, and during this process, I have made quite a few recommendations for change. I requested that tags be added to various fields, primarily related to type of landscape and location, to assist users when searching for certain types of information. I have also discussed with Melissa the importance of matching the common names used in the Wasowskis' books with those used in the Wildflower Center's database. Currently, many of the common names the Wasowskis use are not in the Center's database. I thought that, for consistency, I should use the common names that the Wildflower Center already acknowledges, but Melissa wanted me to go with the names that the Wasowskis use. She indicated that they would be adding these common names into their database so that, ultimately, the two will match.
One other problem that has come up during the course of accessioning the first 500 images is where to draw a distinction between the landscape and the image. The accession form asks me to identify the habit and type of landscape of each image, and for some, the metadata for a particular image varies from that for the landscape it represents (e.g., if all the plants in the image are native, but not all the plants in the landscape are, should this image be cataloged as "native landscape"?). My instinct was to group all of the images in a particular setting together and to catalog these with the same landscape metadata. After a discussion with Melissa, however, I decided to tag images based on the content of the image itself rather than the landscape as a whole. This was a difficult decision to make, and I am not sure that there is one right answer to this problem. As the database itself has not yet been expanded to accommodate landscape images (the Wildflower Center is still working on developing a web presence/portal for them), we do not yet know exactly how people will be using this collection. However, we speculated that people would not be searching for all of the images of a particular landscape (and if they are, they will be able to search for this landscape by name and pull up all images of it). Thus, ultimately, we thought it would be most helpful to catalog the items independently.
Lastly, we discussed how the landscape images would appear on the website. Melissa stated that when someone searches for a plant in the database, a link for landscape images will appear below the botanical images. I suggested that it would also be a good idea to create a link from the homepage to the landscape collection, as there is for the botanical images. In addition, I stated that I thought it would be best if - eventually - the collection is searchable by both keywords and tags.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
Accessioning
Having completed all of the scanning and image processing, I am now ready to move on to the last phase of my project - accessioning the images and uploading them to the database. This involves not just researching the images to uncover important metadata that will be critical to helping users find them but also helping the Wildflower Center develop a structure for the accession form. The Wasowski slides are the first landscape images that the Center has acquired, and because I am the person most familiar with the content of those images, I have insight into what kind of data needs to be collected and what the most reasonable structure for collecting that data is.
The form captures some basic information for every image (e.g., title, photographer, location), but there are also a number of sections whose relevance varies depending on the content of the slide (e.g., botanical or wildlife information). Some of the items, such as title, location, and shot details, are text-entry fields, but others, such as habitat and wildlife type, were set up as drop-down boxes. Melissa asked me to spend a few hours doing some trial accessions, to see what, if any, problems I could find with the data-collection process.
One of the biggest issues I saw was developing a unique title for each image. The title needs to be as descriptive as possible while staying under approximately 10 words, in order to increase the possibility that users will find the collection while conducting a web search. The problem is many of the images are similar enough so that developing a distinctive title for each one could be challenging. I discussed this issue with Melissa, and she agreed that we needed to develop some guidelines for titling similar items.
Another problem I encountered was specifically related to how the landscape type was defined. For this category of data, there were a number of options to choose from: native, non-native, mixed, invasive, natural, planned, and cultivated. I wasn't entirely sure how some of these options were different from one another, and I wasn't sure that users would be clear on that either. I did some research and found that the Wildflower Center had defined some of these terms differently than other organizations or individuals, including the Wasowskis. I suggested to Melissa that we might want to provide more descriptive information about these terms, so that both users and Wildflower Center staff members would be clear on how they are being used.
One final problem that I found was that there were a number of individuals who were in the images but whose names were not in the Center's list of standardized names. Most of these individuals were only in one picture, so this likely won't be a problem for this project. Nonetheless, if in the future additional images featuring these individuals are accessioned, the Center will need to have a standardized way of referring to them.
The form captures some basic information for every image (e.g., title, photographer, location), but there are also a number of sections whose relevance varies depending on the content of the slide (e.g., botanical or wildlife information). Some of the items, such as title, location, and shot details, are text-entry fields, but others, such as habitat and wildlife type, were set up as drop-down boxes. Melissa asked me to spend a few hours doing some trial accessions, to see what, if any, problems I could find with the data-collection process.
One of the biggest issues I saw was developing a unique title for each image. The title needs to be as descriptive as possible while staying under approximately 10 words, in order to increase the possibility that users will find the collection while conducting a web search. The problem is many of the images are similar enough so that developing a distinctive title for each one could be challenging. I discussed this issue with Melissa, and she agreed that we needed to develop some guidelines for titling similar items.
Another problem I encountered was specifically related to how the landscape type was defined. For this category of data, there were a number of options to choose from: native, non-native, mixed, invasive, natural, planned, and cultivated. I wasn't entirely sure how some of these options were different from one another, and I wasn't sure that users would be clear on that either. I did some research and found that the Wildflower Center had defined some of these terms differently than other organizations or individuals, including the Wasowskis. I suggested to Melissa that we might want to provide more descriptive information about these terms, so that both users and Wildflower Center staff members would be clear on how they are being used.
One final problem that I found was that there were a number of individuals who were in the images but whose names were not in the Center's list of standardized names. Most of these individuals were only in one picture, so this likely won't be a problem for this project. Nonetheless, if in the future additional images featuring these individuals are accessioned, the Center will need to have a standardized way of referring to them.
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