Just Digitise It overview

So, what did I bring away from the Just Digitise It workshop?

We are basically on the right track, but I have now got a few more ideas, and understand a bit more now about photograph formats, and may even be able to watermark. (Note - must experiment. Ideal way to get a gratuitous photo on this post).

I know bit more now about how archivists work, and I have met the Dublin Core protocol, for ensuring that when material is loaded onto the net, the fields generally mean the same thing. (I wonder if the Dublin Core was run over the Victorian Cataloguing Manual). This is all a little too deep and meaningful for me, but it is good to know it is there.

The bottom line is, what we learned was basically the view of things as they are for archivists (who are very nice people!), but we are working with integrated collections of objects and paper-based materials, so I think it was a case of taking away what we could from the workshop, and seeing how we could apply it to our own structure. Rather than think "Okay, this is what we need to change to doing, what we have been doing is wrong".

The Victorian Cataloguing Manual (download HERE) is silent on the subject of documents (although it does deal well with photographs). Well, not actually silent. When it is explaining why it does not include treatment of documents, on page 9, it explains that the POD (Places of Deposit) program from the PROV now exists, “which makes it unlikely that community museums will acquire archives”.

There are a few things that are wrong in the Manual, but that is the silliest. The POD program means collections will have more documents (in the case of the one I administer, more bound unique books), not less. We need to know how to integrate them into a catalogue with objects.

So some of us are moving down the track of serious consideration of cataloguing for integrated collections, and now I understand a bit more of the jargon. It was fascinating to hear Catalogue Sheets referred to as "Meta Data Sheets".

The local groups who were present from the City of Latrobe, with some nearby friends, have now decided to meet on a regular basis to further work on digital issues (read that as self-help on things like Photo Shop, Flickr, image management and blogging).

So all-in-all, two days well spent.

(Although I still haven't had time to experiment with watermarking. There goes the gratuitous photo for this post. Maybe I will just go and find a something and post it for the fun of it.)