On Tuesday––a day earlier than we anticipated––we completed the development of the metadata for Turbulence.org for the Coping with Bits project. This means that the undergraduate researchers filled out the fields mapped for ingestion into the data management system that Abby Adams, Nicholas Schiller, Leo Flores, and I are using for creating the ELO’s repository.
The two founders of Turbulence.org, Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington, had provided me with two Excel spreadsheets containing the Commissioned Works and Artists for the 358 works listed in Turbulence.org’s inventory. Using these two documents, Abby and Nicholas developed the additional fields needed for enhancing the findability of and documenting the works.
Jo-Anne and Helen also sent along eight boxes of physical archives, one of which contained e-lit and media art saved on removable disks that correlated to the digital files. The undergraduate researchers were able to include information about the physical artifacts in the metadata. Three other boxes contain contracts, proposals, promotional materials, and other information related to each of the commissioned works. When we return to the lab on Thursday, we will be checking these files for any information missing about the works in the metadata.
Next week we hit the ground running with the trAce Online Writing Centre collection, working to get the 24 e-lit works published in its journal, frAme (issues 1-6), into the repository and recreating the issues for access to the works.
In the meantime Greg Philbrook, the project’s tech support guru, and Leo are working on designing the front end of our site. I am overseeing the workflow by overseeing the undergraduate researchers’ work and preparing the collections for them.
So far, so good. . .