The Known and the Unknown

Hello everyone and happy Wednesday! I've just emerged from another week in the world of CONTENTdm and I feel like I'm understanding more and more what it likes and what it doesn't like. Thus far, I've added a digitized image of the reverse side of close to 30 Tipton photographs!

During the process of adding metadata and digitized images to extant Tipton photographs in the GettDigital Collection, I have become more familiar with the steps needed to create folders that are compatible with the CONTENTdm system. In fact, I hardly cringe anymore when CONTENTdm is extracting the information I have placed within various file folders in order to create a cohesive entry for each photograph. :) For me, the most helpful step in the learning process was understanding more fully how CONTENTdm took the disparate metadata in excel spreadsheets and jpeg images and transformed it into a keyword searchable digitized photograph entry. Although I will not claim to know the tecnical intricacies of how CONTENTdm operates, I can see how the information I put in the different rows and columns (aka fields) of an excel spreadsheet are transferred into the metadata that appears under a digitized photograph in the GettDigital Collection.

Now that I have demonstrated how I am "in the know" about certain facets of CONTENTdm, I feel the need to also share one the aspects of the system that I'm not familiar with yet. After I have gone through the process of modifying and adding metadata and photographs, I upload the information in CONTENTdm and prepare it for publishing on the GettDigital Collection. My adjusted Tipton photo entries are in a certain digitzed pergatory of sorts until Catherine Perry, Special Collections' Archival Assistant, publishes them in the GettDigital Collection. In addition to adding the new entries, Catherine also has to take down the old, unmodified entries. Although I have yet to understand this process, Catherine has promised to show me how to do this next week! In this way, the unknown will be known before too long!