PDHC General Meeting Update

Please check our wiki for the full minutes from the meeting April 7th, 2011. (Click here) Some highlights were:

• The Huntington will be partering with the PDHC. Almost 900 photographs from the Harold Parker collection will be added. This is great time for our next online exhibit in July since the Huntington’s Parker Collection has many photographs of education in Pasadena. We will work out any issues with subject headings as we go, and Mario has given us permission to add our own local headings as we see appropriate.


• Preservation Week is in full swing at PPL and PCC - exhibits up April 25-29th.


• There are many enhancements from CONTENTdm 6, but even more for 6.1; therefore, we have decided to wait to upgrade everything to 6.1 in June when it is released.


• Still waiting to hear back from the NEH about our grant proposal

PCC: Collaborating With Pasadena Museum of History

Today I stopped by to lend a hand (and an extra pair of eyes) to the Pasadena Museum of History. While there, I aided their Intern with finding errors in metadata that prevented the adding of multiple-items. The problems were inconsistencies in file names as well as file type mismatches. This is a very easy error to make and it will stop the adding of items to the client dead in its tracks.

In the end, all the errors were found and the items were able to be added.

PCC: Metadata Added to General Campus Life Project

I entered metadata for 20 items under the "General Campus Life Project". I then took the metadata from MSExcel and did a mutiple-item add to the CONTENTdm project client, which went very well. Now the images are ready for their Subject Heading fields to be populated by our cataloger Carol Cooper.

PCC: Metadata Schema Change

I have moved the field "Original File Name" to the last position in the metadata schema for the Pasadena City College collection from the administration side. I did this to save the trouble of re-mapping the fields upon multiple-item uploads. The client automatically assumes that the last field of the schema is where the "Object File Name" goes. Our last field was originally "Inputter" and is now "Original File Name" which is the correct field to be mapped to "Object File Name."

PCC: CONTENTdm Workshop Update

A planning meeting was held today to discuss the CONTENTdm workshop (funded by the PCC Foundation mini-grant award). that will be held for selected PCC Library Tech students later this Fall. in attendance were Linda Stewart, Mary Ann Laun, Krista Goguen, and myself. We discussed the workshop specifics with a focus on the learning objectives and the hands-on experiences that will be offered at the workshop.

It was decided that the students who attend the workshop will also be committed to doing 60 hrs of field practice through PCC's Library Technology Program.

PCC: Fixing the Note Field

Today I noticed that there is an error in the way that we have been entering metadata into the Note field. I began the process of editing the entries for the records uploaded so far (which must be done from the administrative side of CONTENTdm because they have already been approved and uploaded from the client). This will take a couple of days, but in the end is worth it for consistency and aesthetic which will aid the user.

The field used to have a complete sentence written about what is on the back of the photograph. For example it would say:

Written on the back of the photograph is "A Pasadena City College Photograph."

But, according to our semantics for the metadata schema, it should read:

"A Pasadena City College Photograph" -- back of photo.

Now that I have noticed this error, all subsequent entries will be entered in the correct way.