This week, we had a case at my library where we wanted to extract the full-text field for a few of our digital collections and save it as a separate text file for each image.  Normally, we create text files for images by running OCR on them outside of CONTENTdm.  But for a few collections, transcriptions were manually created and entered into the Full Text field directly in CONTENTdm.  We wanted to transfer those transcriptions from the CONTENTdm metadata to plain text files that we can preserve separately, both as a backup and in preparation for a future migration.

Earlier this summer, I had an experience where a collection that I was creating metadata for had a really strong emotional impact on me. It felt really significant, and made me think about the ways that I relate to collections that I work with. I tweeted about the experience at the time, and I’ve collected those tweets here.

I’m working on a handful of projects about the history of MARC, and one of the things that would be really useful to me is a good, concise history of the family of MARC formats. I haven’t been able to find quite what I’m looking for, so I decided to make it!

I’m trying to get better at writing out the process for things that I do in my day-to-day metadata work. Mostly, I want to do this for my own personal use - to help me think through my processes more clearly, and to have something to refer back to the next time I want to do something similar.  But I’m also aware of how valuable I find other metadata librarians’ descriptions of the work that they do, so I’m going to post this kind of process-oriented writing here on my blog.  If you read this and have thoughts, questions, suggestion, I’d love to talk about it with you!

After reading about the Jane-athon that is happening at ALA Midwinter in a few months, I decided that I’d like to play around with RDA cataloging outside of the strictures of MARC.  I had a quiet afternoon at my library a few weeks ago, so I figured it was a good time to download the RIMMF tool and try it out.  RIMMF, or RDA In Many Metadata Formats, was created by Deborah and Richard Fritz to use as a training tool for RDA cataloging.  They did a huge service to the library community by creating and releasing it for people like me to play with it.  RIMMF is pretty simple and bare-bones, but I was really excited to use a tool that was designed specifically for RDA.

I tweeted about this a little earlier, but it stayed in my mind for a while today, so I thought it deserved a fuller exploration.  This is all very sketchy and not fully thought-out, but it’s something I’ve thought about before and don’t have any easy answers for.

I spent this morning curled with a cup of coffee and the Spring/Summer issue of The American Archivist, which I have been slowly working my way through.  This morning, I finished Jennifer Douglas and Heather MacNeil’s article applying genre studies to the calendars and inventories produced at the Public Archives of Canada, and Heather Soyka and Eliot Wilczek’s on documenting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  Both excellent pieces, with a lot to think about.  For some reason, the thing that popped out at me from both pieces was the role of archival jargon in what we do and the way we present ourselves as a profession.