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.