Metadata and Enterprise Manager
I am within a week or so of getting all of the Iowa Writes entries into contentDM in at least the first version. There will need to be some changes as Daily Palette is planning on fixing a few programming idiosyncrasies that have created some oddities in the formatting I have been “screen shooting.” They have also sent over to DLS the full text of each entry and other important information. Mark and I will have two work sessions together this next week to get these pieces included into the records.
On the WiderNet front I have been learning about Enterprise Manager and making tables and views. I also started creating a webpage to display the information being pulled from the database. The best part about this whole project has been how closely connected the work I am doing has been with what I am learning in Database Systems. I really feel that this part of my fellowship and my course are dovetailing in the most efficient way possible.
Working on the View
Cliff spent a ton of time with me this week working on creating tables and appropriate views for the soon to be functional catalogers interface. I will be spending time working on tidying up the look of the interface and adding in some functionalities Cliff and I agree need to be included.
I also met with Jen and Mark about some cataloging issues, or more so consistency issues, with the Daily Palette entries. Seems like we’ve ironed out most everything I have run into so far. I had a meeting with the Daily Palette staff and the Iowa Review to talk about progress and next steps for the Iowa Writes collection. There are numerous other avenues that will be explored for possible content in the coming months/years.
I would like to give a big CONGRATULATIONS to the Daily Palette for its upcoming 1250th entry! Amazing! I too hope it goes on forever and that DLS continues to archive its contents into the master collection.
Daily Palette
The past few weeks I have been meeting with Jon and Christina to discuss my part in curating a small collection for Daily Palette. As soon as I get the Iowa Writes records into CONTENTdm, I will begin to focus my work on this. So far I have entered about one hundred Iowa Writes pieces into CONTENTdm but have run into numerous issues with how records need to be named and what fields are available. Jen and I will meet this week to try to iron out some of the quirks. For example, sometimes a single author had multiple poems appear on the Daily Palette on one specific day. We had originally assumed that each day would have only one entry so this is a conundrum. There are also issues with translations and acknowledging the translators. I have been keeping pages of notes to go over with Jen and once everything is fixed then I will be able to move things out of permissions limbo and into the general collection.
