Old Vault Letters, Michelle Godfrey-February 6, 2013

Today I got to continue with the Old Vault Letters collection and worked on the same set Elaine did back in November:  MSS113-

b01f02-02

b01f06-02

b01f09-01

b01f10-01

There was not too much difficulty with this batch even though the letters certainly had a lot of legalese and jargon (enough to make you a little dizzy).

In our second letter, I made a guess that the word “said” got abbreviated to an s and d, written like this -  “s^d” 

 “s^d slave”

I don’t know how to verify that but it makes sense within the context of the letter. 

The condition of the third letter was quite good. The handwriting was straight and crisp and it looked like it had been written recently rather than back in 1836.

The last letter was written in 1839 by Mirabeau Lamar, the President of the Republic of Texas. He was nominating two men to political positions. There was a curious phrase that must be in reference to voting on nominees. One nominee was unanimously confirmed but the other one, Bee, got “laid on the table”.   

Bee laid on the table [?]

Seems like it all worked out for Mr. Bee. A little research revealed that Bernard Elliot Bee later served as the Republic's Secretary of State in 1839. Bee County and the city of Beeville were named in his honor.

Minutes & Photos, 2/4/2013

I did a few more scans of Meeting Minutes and added them to the other blog; 2007 is almost done. One or two pages didn't get treated very well by OCR which slowed me down a little (in one, periods were all translated into underscores, among other errors, for some reason) but no real problems.

I spent the rest of the time recording photo information of various headshots and a few group pictures from the Franklin Beauty School, 1967-1971ish. No real problems for this, either, though one envelope actually contained 4 photos: 3 similar headshots and 1 black-and-white copy of one of them as well as a note that elucidated the reason for the multiple photos. Apparently the subject hadn't liked her original photo and, it seems, wasn't willing to pay for it, presumably leading to retakes.

Sheet Music Collection: CONTENTdm and Metadata

So this week began my first interaction with the CONTENTdm software and the application of metadata. Much of the information I was able to apply could be found on the sheet music and the inventory spreadsheet created by another volunteer, Mary. In some cases, I had to use the Internet to find the information. For example, I used the Library of Congress Authorities website to find name and subject authority tags. In those cases wherein I was unsure of what tags to use (because, unlike OCLC Connexion, the LOC authorities do not provide describing information for some tags, so it was difficult to know if I was using the right name), I turned to other sheet music collections using WorldCat. With this method, I was able to find which authority tags were appropriate and was even able to retrieve new ones.

One field I am re-thinking is the "full-text for song" field. This field is one I struggle with a bit, mostly because I do not know quite how to frame the lyrics. Do I write it out like poetry using (/) to separate lyrics? Do I maintain the spellings of the lyrics (which I have been doing so far)? I've noticed during my search for metadata that most collections merely provide the first line of the song and chorus. I am seriously considering that option instead of full-text.

I also struggle with providing genre and subject tags. I noticed in my research that many music collections use general tags (e.g., Songs for Piano or Popular music -- 1901-1911). I'm going to stick with these because I am not a music expert at all. I'm quite sure the descriptive genre and subject tags would be different if applied by someone who is knowledgeable about this subject.

Below are some examples of the items I have scanned:

Handwritten musical notation.  

A bug died and merged onto this cover. It also discolored it.  

So pretty and simple.

Meeting Minutes scanning - 1/28/13

Today I stopped at about halfway through 2007's minutes, which seemed like a tidy place to cut off my scanning. Didn't encounter any issues.

I tidied up the tags a bit: for example, I changed the 'FLIP/CLICK' tag to just 'Flip kits' and moved "procedure" and "biography" to the front of the relevant tags to match the others. I also fixed up some of the posts I noticed had weird formatting (as I mentioned last week, I believe, these looked fine on the first round of edits, but upon posting them, the formatting didn't stick and the fonts, sizes, and colors varied). I dodged that problem with later posts by pasting first into HTML mode and then switching to Compose mode.

Sheet Music Collection: First Pieces of Artwork

Well, the first two days on my practicum have been an exciting learning experience!  So far, I've learned about the sheet music collection at HPL and have made a priority list of items based on condition and copyright date. I've only located one Texana item, though I do hope to scan that one sometime next week.

I've also gained some experience with new technologies like the CopiBook scanner at the JIB and using Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert TIFF files into PDF and execute OCR software onto the resulting derivatives. I like that the texts from the scanned music sheets will now be searchable, exportable, and editable. One field in the collection that I am a strong supporter of is the full-text field. I think having a transcript of the lyrics would be a nice feature to the collection.

So far, I have scanned 18 items with the CopiBook scanner. The process was a bit rough in the beginning, but it smooths out a bit once a person has developed a workflow.

For me, I use the down time (e.g., waiting for Adobe to execute the OCR software) to search the spreadsheet for sheet music that are in poor and/or fragile condition (but still meets the public domain requirement) and jot down the call number and barcode - at least 20 titles at a time. Then, I make additional folders in which to save the images. (The file name we are using for the collection is SM0000X since that number should cover us for up to 99,999 documents.) I record this number on the folders housing the sheet music when I am scanning documents so that I know where I am in the scanning process and am not wasting time hunting for non-scanned items (like I did on the first day - thanks to my practicum supervisor for that tip!). Also, having the digital folders already created and named on the hard drive or flash drive also aids me in remembering where I am in the process.

One thing I have discovered while working on this project is that some of the most damaged items in need of digitizing are orchestral compositions, and so far those works have been about forty to fifty pages long. I am hoping that this will not have too much of an impact on the amount of items I have digitized by the end of my practicum, but if I want to bolster the number of items I scan per day, I will probably have to change my priority list a bit.

That said, I finally scanned some artwork!  There was a haunting cover I did today but was unable to download from the computer at JIB.  I will post it next week because it is... unique.

 

Meeting Minutes scanning, 01/14/2013

Same as last week but without the Internet problems, thankfully. I ended today with the minutes for Nov. 13, 2008.

I noticed I was reusing many of the tags I created last week (yay), and that I had some similar-but-different tags that will need to be edited for consistency. E.g. BWI vs BWI kits. I changed my mind about labeling procedures and will be redoing those as well (to have 'procedure' be the leading word instead of the last one). On the other hand, there's a benefit to having the "procedure" discussions next to whatever topic it is, though I don't think any of them yet overlap in that way. As it is currently, the only trailing 'procedure' tag concerns library safety/security policy and procedure, so not really jumbled, at least.

I do think it will be good to make the last thing I do for this tag clean-up, just because I've noticed recurring things that I may have already tagged once per a chronologically later minutes write-up but that I get a better understanding of as I do earlier minutes which elaborate more on a then-new subject.

Meeting Minutes scanning, 01/07/2013

Today I worked on digitizing hard copies of meeting minutes to copy over to another blog for easier reference.

The biggest challenge today: the Internet connection! It died twice, and when the real meat of one's work involves being online (editing the text to be posted and, in particular, devising tags), the lack really puts a crimp in things. Argh. Even the wired connection on the desktop computer was being difficult.

For the tags I created, I mostly went off the section headings in each set of minutes. Some were simple and straightforward, like OCLC Reclamation Project. When I noticed some overlapping subjects, I started to make joint tags, e.g. author names: Mc; author names: pseudonyms.This is something I'm going to have to revise and tweak a bit to make as coherent as possible (and to conform to any preferences for tagging, if any).

Some pages I ended up keeping as images if the layout of the content would have been too complex to introduce as text in a blog post while retaining the (important) formatting. Alas, one of the few things to criticize about Blogger is the lack of ability to upload documents in addition to images. I suppose one is expected to use Google Docs/Drive, but I didn't think it prudent to make the hosting reliant on my personal account. The posts would be a bit more streamlined if the documents could just be linked wherever a "see attached" is noted, but the images do get the job done.

I fiddled with anchor tags to try to smooth things out a bit more and in the process wasted a bunch of time with redoing them several times before determining that switching back to "Compose" mode breaks them. (Thanks, Blogger.)  Good example is this page. I think I may have broken anchor tags on another page to fix, but I've overlooked it in reviewing the entries I did. (Note to self!)