Experience Talks: Post-Digitization Quality Control Strategies and Tools Mark Phillips – August 5, 2010

Repurposing NDNP content.

Or...

What we learned when we started to eat our own dog food.

We had two years of happy content delivery

Then we got to the point where we had to add it to our system.

We had a slightly different model in our system

So we had to write our own ingest tools

Which wasn't hard because we had a nice “robust” specification

But we ran into some interesting 'stuff'

Our process for reusing NDNP content.

LC accepts batch, and ships it back

We move it to the local network

And start to add additional metadata

What do we add?

Our model for the Portal to Texas History (and all of our digital collections)

Has us adding a bit more metadata for each issue.

Really it is most of the data in the title record pushed down to the issue level

We add the following fields

title.serial subject.lcsh subject.untl-bs description.content description.physical coverage.placeName coverage.era publisher creator.editor contributor.(various) language identifiers.(various)

We create a metadata template for each group of “like” issues.

Creating a new template anytime something significant changes.

Then we automate the addition of date, volume, issue, edition, pagination from the METS/MODS

I run a few scripts to check groupings for consistency.

Then I create submission packages for each issue.

Issues get added to our repository where they are treated like any other content in our repository.

We also shove the full batch into our repository as a digital object.

We sometimes catch things that were missed in previous QC

Mainly because it is a different view of the data

Looking at the same data in different ways is a very good qc tool

lists, simple graphs or timelines

Reveal subtle patterns that “could” be problems

Bring it back around Mark...

Oh yeah QC of metadata...

So one of the things we've wanted to experiment with was looking at a batch with different views of the data.

And up until recently that has required more effort than we were willing to put toward the project.

We are very interested in using the Chronicling America application as a framework for understanding these NDNP batches easier.

Creating views of batches that we could share with other awardees.

Hopefully improving quality along the way.