Week Five, Day Eight- October 23

Today we continued to work on creating a metadata spread sheet for the collection. Since we had finished the 1930s and 1940s, we began working on the 1950s. There is a lot more material for this decade so it will probably take us at least another day of working to finish it up. There are a lot more photos in the this collection and many of them are head shots of various radio personalities. It looks like Bob or someone else has written names and dates on some of them, but we will have to talk with him after we finish processing all the materials to find as much information about each item as he has. I'm also beginning to think about ways that we can put information that Bob might not be totally sure about into the metadata. If he thinks he knows who is in a picture, but isn't totally sure, we don't want to put that into the description field because it might end up being wrong and that might lead a researcher down the wrong path. But it could be right and we wouldn't want to exclude information we are not sure about.

This issue is something that the world of metadata must work on and try to figure out a solution. When one is processing a collection and making the metadata, you can't put in information that you are unsure of, but you also don't want to leave it out. It would be helpful to develop a field within the metadata schema that would also a person to include information but make sure the patron or researcher know the information may or may not be correct. It would also be helpful to let users make additions to metadata, but this also could only be done if the information is displayed in such a way as to make it clear it came from the public rather than the archive itself.