As the faded Hollywood star played by Elizabeth Taylor in There Must be a Pony (1986) wryly quips ‘That’s the problem with life–bad lighting and no music.’ We might add to this list of life’s deficiencies: insufficient time and inadequate metadata. In a project such as our digital history of Morningside Heights, however, we do have some control over these last two issues.
The Project Management team, working in concert with our other teams, established at the beginning a timeline for what needs to take place and when to insure initial project launch in December 2014. This timeline has been periodically revisited and adjusted by the group as a whole. For our latest revisiting I will be meeting with individual team leaders to make sure that I understand fully all of the items to which deadlines are attached at this point and how they interrelate. Our timeline, as adjusted based on this latest revisiting, will be posted on this blog.
In our last group meeting we included some discussion of metadata, following up from an earlier meeting with one of our catalogers that was devoted to the topic. Each time anyone uploads an item to our project site, decisions need to be made and fields filled out in an Omeka template that is based on Dublin Core. Now that the group as a whole is devoting more time to identifying and uploading items, it is key that we arrive at clear agreements on how we are using and interpreting the template.
