Hello, People of the Blogosphere!  We’ve been very busy working on a number of projects this summer, one of which has been the Southern Architect and Building News digitization project.

Part of what’s so neat about this project is that we get to collaborate with other wonderful folks around the UT Libraries.  The downside of this is that it means we have to coordinate and make decisions together about the workflow, standards, and overall goals.  This does make it take a bit longer than if all the work were happening in-house here at the Library.

So far, we have sent several batches of about 10 volumes over to our friends in Digitization Services to be scanned and ingested into the Data Asset Management System (DAMS).  They have input some metadata for us, but part of what we have to decide here at the Library is what our metadata schema will look like.  There is a lot of information we could include in our metadata, so we have to make some choices about what will be most meaningful to our end users and how much information it is realistic to enter for each item.

The last batch of Southern Architect has been sent to PCL to be digitized, which is pretty exciting!  Once this is finished we will pick them up and they will join the rest of Southern Architect to await metadata entry!  Currently all the already digitized copies of Southern Architect are back at the Library, so once the paged content issues with the DAMS are fixed, we should be ready to go all-in on metadata!   

We’re slowly working our way through some of the issues with the DAMS.  This project is for the long haul, so it is going to take some time to get Southern Architect and Building News digitized and available online.  But, we also known what a special publication it is and how fascinating it is and its value to architectural history!  We can’t wait to keep working to make sure every one can see for themselves what makes Southern Architect so special and important!