Week Six, Day Ten- October 30

Today we worked towards finishing the metadata for the 1950s. I really thought that since we finished the pictures the last time we worked, but we would be able to finish the documents in one day. No such luck! There was just so much to look at and type. The processing goes so much faster with pictures because there is only a little bit of information that you need about a picture, who is in it, what year was it taken, and in the case of this collection, to what radio station does it relate? Well, the same can not be said for documents.

I think it takes almost twice as long to catalog a document than a picture. I think this is mostly due to the fact that I enjoy reading most of the newspaper articles and some of the letters to get a better feel for how to describe them in the metadata. But its difficult to write a description because there is just so much information in most of the documents that a little line in a spread sheet. I don't think its good to overly describe the document because then things get too wordy and it might make it difficult in searching by research for items of interest. I think with practice I'll get better at making precise descriptions for documents like I can for photos.