This week of progress!

This week I continued with my metadata entry and I figured out a system thats good for me. I think sitting down and getting into the zone is really helpful. I haven't been doing much scans as working from home or the library is much more accessible with my schedule. Last Friday I sent an email to the museum director which resulted in us having a really nice chat today. I was very thankful Dylan was able to show up so I wouldn't be in the meeting alone. They first expressed concern for doing a booklet type of website for The Pelican (shown in the last blog) since there is so much material to go through. We talked about what their team would really want to come out of this project and their main answer was metadata. Although it's metadata, their needs are more specific than what our team at UCF is currently doing. I think Dylan had pointed out that what we were recording was a bit repetitive, and I agree with him on that.

What Does the New Smyrna Museum of History Want Exactly

They expressed interest in having all the pages accessble and searchable for the general public. This would mean having names be searchable or even streets/houses. This makes a lot of sense for what a museum would want and he told us people come into the museum looking to get more informaiton from their family tree. They had also expressed interest in having the metadata entry process be automated with human supervision, a very good idea in my opinion. A method of doing this is having object buckets (contianing the images) then mapped to their key words; the key words would be extracted from OCR. Seeing how much information there really is, automation is basically a must for the future of this project. Time is not so much a worry for them but to have a large project that everyone in the team is proud of. Erica is an intern with the museum and she was able to point out how some others have collaborated with libraries to set this system up, and I'm very grateful for the input. This internship is really getting exciting and I would even love to continue working on it after graduation since it still ties me into history and the archives.