For my Fall 2008 project I am working with Ian Mason to create a digital collection of Geoscience slides from the University of Iowa Geoscience Professor Brian F. Glenister. During his distinguished carreer Brian Glenister has specialized in Invertibrate paleontology, paleontology of Cephalopods, Paleozoic ammonoids and nautaloids and patterns of evolution in biostratigraphy of the Paleozoic.
The Brian F. Glenister Geoscience collection consists of over 4000 slides that have been digitized by an outside company into JPEG file format that will be archived using CONTENTdm. When complete the collection will be a valuable resource for teaching and study in the geosciences.
To begin working on this project Ian and I looked at the Geoscience Slides Digital Collection, http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/geoscience, that has been completed in the Iowa Digital Library. From this collection we gained a template to build on of what metadata fields we should use to describe items in the Glenister collection. Ian and I also met with Tiffany Adrain of the Geoscience Department and Mark Anderson of DLS to get a overview of the collection and to find out who the intended user base of the collection is and the kinds of information they would be looking for from the collection. Tiffany provided us with some inital metadata information and provided us with the JPEG files.
Ian and I then batch converted the JPEG files to 2400x1600 px JPEG8 using Photoshop. Once the files were converted we looked through them to see if any needed to be rotated and recoverted in their correct layout. With the help of Mark we then renamed the all of the files adding a prefix of bsg to the file name.
We also worked on coming up with a metadata template for the collection. To do this we looked at the previous geoscience slide collection and some examples that we found such as:
British Geological Survey (BGS) National Archive of Geological Photographshttp://www.bgs.ac.uk/photoarchive/home.cfm
British Geological Survey (BGS) National Archive of Geological Photographshttp://www.bgs.ac.uk/photoarchive/home.cfm
After looking at these the previous collection and talking to Mark and Tiffany we settled on metadata fields to use.
Ian and I then received additional metadata information from Tiffany and inserted it into the template we developed adding information such as subject headings into a Excel spreadsheet.
This week I think we should accomplish:
Importing our first batch of slides into CONTENTdm
Meet with Tiffany and Brian Glenister to discuss metadata some more
Create metadata records for another batch of slides
