Final steps

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.