Maitland A&H Summer Blog Entry 5

    This week's work has been a typical day for working at Maitland A&H. The only difference between last week and this week was that I had to change to a new office. As mentioned, my task is to scan documents for the organization. Since my first day working at Maitland A&H, I have been constantly focused on one box to get done; I am glad to say that the first Waterhouse box I worked on will complete by next week. With such a completion, I will post photos of my workstation next week and the Waterhouse home.

    Once my task of scanning is finished, my job will not be complete as there is still the fact that the scans have to be labeled and metadata be created to go with the scans. If someone else were to make the metadata, it would most likely be a difficult task as they would have to go through each pdf file, read what the document was about, and write out the metadata. If I were to complete the task, it would most likely be not as challenging as I already know what most of the documents are about and could fill it out quicker.

    For those unaware of what metadata is, the best way to explain it is that it helps catalog the digital archive. Archives can use metadata to help researchers look for what needs quicker. Most well-known digital archives with the finding and the time make it available for researchers to look up keywords and get the documents they are looking for in a second. An example of this would be if someone needed a paper written by President Gerald Ford talking about the country's economy in 1976, then they could type a key world and find what they were looking for then going though even documents that came out in 1976. If a researcher were to look at what I had scanned at Maitland, they would get an assortment of scanned works as there is no uniformity. The only way so far to find a document is by the title I had provided. The issue with that is there are a few documents with the same name as they are similar works. Metadata would help find what researchers would want.

    Now that the scanning process is almost over, Maitland A&H must decide if they want to start the metadata. It is most likely that they will ask me to continue scanning, but I will address the issue to Katie if I should work on the metadata.

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