Last Blog Post

While I may not be hitting the magic number of posts (I was so close!), I will make this my last blog post of the semester. I do not want to fill up this blog with mumbo jumbo just to hit 39 posts. I don't think that is fair to my classmates or Dr. MacCall so 32 blog posts will have to suffice.

I have so enjoyed this course and was especially grateful to Dr. MacCall for urging me a few semesters back to sign up. I am an advocate for project-based learning and the assignments used for this course were just that. They allowed me to get my hands dirty and full grasp the idea and practice behind metadata and what a useful tool it is in the world, not just librarianship.

Props and a huge thank you to Dr. MacCall for always being open to discussions, questions and ideas during our journey into the world of metadata and PLN's. Also, thank you to my classmates for indulging in my wordy blog posts, crazy questions, feelings of inadequecy in the field. Y'all are seriously the best.

Now I can officially call myself a "Metadata Minion". :)

Thoughts on my PLN

I will admit, the task of creating and updating my PLN for this class was a little daunting at first. It wasn't until I got the hang of Twitter that I really found it useful for pointing my classmates and colleagues to particular bits of information, interesting articles or questions on this blog that I really felt the full effect of a PLN. Heck, I even made a connection on Twitter with someone who has my same interested in Museums, Archives and Special Collection exhibits! We started up a convo via Twitter, then moved to a private message chat where she shared some amazing resources with me!

While I may not keep this blog up after today, I plan on continuing my PLN through Twitter and other modes of social media. It is such a great way to connect and keep up with the goings on within a particular field of interest.

I hope to keep up with all my classmates and fellow cohortians via my PLN after graduation and look forward to seeing the awesome things everyone is doing!

Presentation Evaluations COMPLETE

I just finished up my presentation evaluations and grading! I thought everyone did a fantastic job presenting on their repositories and metadata schemas and my grading reflects that. :) There are so many interesting digital repositories I knew nothing about before this assignment. The metadata schemas were awesome and it was cool to see how and why they were created.

Great job everyone!

OMEKA

I thought I would throw in my two cents on Omeka. I know some of my fellow classmates have their issues with it, but I really enjoyed working in this platform. It was visually easy to use, if that makes sense? It had a clean, simple interface that made it easy to navigate - almost like building a WYSIWYG website.

I will say that I, like Tonya (or maybe Nikki?), was aggravated that there is no way of looking at an image that you are creating the metadata for WHILE you create the metadata. After clicking around a bunch, I eventually just opened Omeka in another window, moved both identical windows side by side on my screen and indexed one in one window while viewing it in another. This made the process clumsy and time consuming, but it worked.

I am glad that I had the chance to do some real metadata work within Omeka and was happy as a lark to be able to add Omeka to my resume under "Technology Proficiencies".

Image Indexing COMPLETE

This week, with the help of my football obsessed husband, I completed my football image indexing! I must say, even with the guidelines for the description element, it would have been very difficult to complete this assignment on my own.

Also, huge shout out to RACHEL for helping me out with the 1975 Washington player numbers. After hours of searching, I was just about ready to give up until I utilized my PLN and tweeted at Rachel for help. She came through with, I think, the only roster I had not found.

This assignment has been by far one of my favorites in all of graduate school. It was awesome collaborating with my classmates in a "real life" situation. Everyone had so much to bring to the table that it made it easy and enjoyable to stare at football pictures every night for the last few weeks.

:)

Image Properties on a Mac

For those of you on a Mac like me, I followed Stephanie's guidelines for the Creator Element and found myself stumped. I realized she was most likely using a PC and that was why I was unable to find the "properties" of the image under the File tab.

For those of you on a Mac, this is what I did to find the imbedded metadata for my images:

1. Double click on the image file from Adam's email.

2. Command-I will open up the embedded metadata.

3. From here, click on TIFF and you will see "Artist". I am assuming that this is the same as "Author" but I am waiting on confirmation from Stephanie.

I hope this helps!

CREATOR Element Question

My question is for Stephanie and her Creator Element:

I'm on a Mac so finding the properties of the image in order to determine the Creator was a bit challenging, but I did some investigating and figured it out with no problems (I will address this in another blog post for anyone else using a Mac).

My question is this: "Author" is not listed within the metadata of the image but "Artist" is. Should I be using this person for the Creator Element?