http://www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/ewagner/CatholicNewTimes1/insert.php

View all records:

http://www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/ewagner/CatholicNewTimes1/viewall.php

Search page:

http://www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/ewagner/CatholicNewTimes1/enterSearch.php

Search Results page:

http://www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/ewagner/CatholicNewTimes1/results.php

Should I be honest about choosing my metadata schema? I didn’t use any of the sources we read for class directly. I read them, so of course they were in my brain and surely effected choices that I made. To be truthful, though, I mainly used the list of descriptive elements that Maia Sutnik had been drilling into our heads every week in Collections Management. I also looked at the Mira Godard Study Centre Print Collection Cataloguing Manual written by David Harris in 2001. It contains a lot of information, and I used only the most basic categories and limited them to ones that were relevant to the photographs that I was cataloguing. Thinking that this would be a searchable database, and knowing that we probably wouldn’t get advanced enough to do any but the most basic type of search that looked for the exact same set of characters in the SQL field as were entered in the query page, I did things like making the medium a drop down selection tool and made a separate field for the year (YYYY) and the date as it was written. There are some fields that I would consider changing. I did a separate field for the first and last name and didn’t take into consideration that, being a catholic newspaper, there would be “Sisters” and “Fathers” and such. It was such a struggle for me just to get the thing to work (I had to start from scratch three times and have David help me outside of class twice) that when the thing was finally linking up between my SQL table, my entry page, and my view all page I didn’t want to touch anything for fear that I would break it again. I had been under the impression that we were going to spend the last couple of classes making the databases searchable, and I wanted all my ducks in a row before then. I didn’t know that we were doing a write up of the sources we had used for our metadata schemas or anything, and I thought that the pages that are now supposed to be done by the 16th were supposed to be done much earlier, so I really pressed myself to have them finished. I was really looking forward to making these searchable, and I was a bit disappointed in my classmates for not being prepared before class to make that a reality. No one is more computer challenged than I am, and if I was ready to move onto the next stage of the database I know that anyone could have been ready, had they tried. I have it written in my notebook that for the 27th of March we were already supposed to have:

 -created fields, baring in mind authorities that exist

 -at least two sizes of images

 -a field for verso if necessary

-all data inserted 

-all ten images (recto and where applicable verso) scanned and uploaded.

 I worked very hard and spent many hours getting those things ready for the 27th. It was a very stressful couple of weeks for me. If I had known that it would be three more weeks before it was actually due, I would have used more sources to decide on my fields, and I would have done more research to make the entries as accurate as possible. But, as I said before, it took me so long to get the website to work that I didn’t want to go back in and start changing things. I think it would have been helpful to have had a clearly laid out plan for the assignment. I think it also would have helped to do things in a little bit of a different order, something that reflected a little better how it is actually done in collections and museums. Here’s a way that you might consider doing it in the future:

 -before ever touching dreamweaver or sql, have everyone decide on the fields that they are using and record the information about their pictures on a preliminary worksheet with pencil. People shouldn’t handle photographs at the same time that they are working at a crowded computer space with coffee and pens. Have people do this outside of class early on. This would have meant that all of the information was organized and ready to go, and we wouldn’t have been juggling between designing a database and cataloging at the same time.

 -Give students a clear outline of the assignment ahead of time, so that they know what needs to be ready, by what time it needs to be ready, and what percentage of the final grade each element of the project comprises.

I know that some of what I’m saying is the sort of thing that should be in said anonymously in the course survey, but I did that a couple weeks ago before some of this came up. I hope you won’t be offended by anything I’ve said here. I really did get a lot out of the class, and appreciate that you both were willing to take on this course when it isn’t something that you normally would be doing.  I know how busy you both are, and I don’t intend to be overly critical.  You’ve both helped me whenever I’ve had a question about anything or been confused.  There’s a lot of disorganization in other parts of the program, and I think I just have a lot of cumulative frustration, but this was the only class that had a journal to vent it in, so I apologize if I’m going over board.  Thank you both for the time that you’ve put into this last semester, and I wish you both the best.

-emily

Ok, so I had these posts that I thought I published and then I found them in my “draft” file, which I didn’t even know existed.  I’m sorry. I’m new to this crazy world of blogging.  I’ve had such a hard time doing just about anything that involves a computer, that I think that if the only job I can find requires using one I will quit and join a nunnery.  Or, better yet, beg the Deardorff man, Ken Hough, to take me as his apprentice.  And I’ll learn to repair Deardorffs and I can start my own antique camera and photographica repair shop.  Here’s his website:

http://deardorffcameras.0catch.com/index.html

Final remarks on the class:

I feel like this was a difficult course, not in terms of a heavy load of assignments and course work, but in that enough people in the class were like me and became easily frustrated when things didn’t work on the computers.  I’m very much a “fix it” kind of person and have put in new plumbing and wiring and that sort of thing.  Outside of the computer world, when something goes wrong I’m pretty good at getting it to go right again.  But when I get derailed on a computer, I don’t know how to work things out and make them right on my own.  I like logical explanations for why things do the things that they do, and computers seem like their just moody and temperamental.  Especially towards me.  I mean, I know that sometimes it’s just my lack of experience that makes things not work, but sometimes I really do think that computer programs just weren’t designed to work with my kind of brain.

And here’s where the rest of the entry got deleted.  It went something like this, though I’m not going to rewrite it all.  It would only bore you anyway:

ENOUGH!  I’ve whined too much about this (being bad at computers) already.  I learned a lot in this class, despite being frustrated/petrified/stressed at times.  Everything that I was frustrated by, I’m glad that I know about now.  I’m glad we learned MARC.  I’m glad we made databases, and only wish that we would have been able to take them further.  That’s pretty much a distilled version of what I wrote before.  Also, I officially hate blogging and will never do it again.  I hope you won’t rely on this blog alone to determine how much effort I put into the class.  Writing on a blog is so much like writing e-mail or something, and I just can’t seem to get it into my head that this is something we’re getting graded on.  Before this semester I’d never had any teacher in my life ever once ask to see notes (except lab notes), and this semester notes are part of our grade in two classes.  And in both of those classes our teachers asked us to make notes in a certain way.  And in both classes I found it difficult to change my normal note taking process.  You kind of learn how to take notes in a way that will be usefully to you, and I know that I will never look at this blog, so I didn’t really see how making notes in it was useful to me.  But that’s just one girl’s opinion.  I really don’t mean to complain.  I know that you needed something to judge participation and to see that we were keeping up on the reading.  I’m just tired and I’m getting a headache and I should stop babbling on and on.  Thanks for teaching us this semester, and I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I’m a crazy person.

-emily 

-Opening new worlds to new audiences

-telling a story

-being multidisciplanary

-being international

-focusing on an “act of creation”

-resource for education and entertainment

-having a point of view

-recording by a variety of media

-scientific analysis or quantification

-art information is complex

Archival Approach

-function and provenance of archival materials

-not yet universally computerized

-moving towards data-sharing initiatives

-vocabularies are the bridge between library, museum, and visual resources approaches.

Standards:

-standards are mutually agreed upon statements that help to control an action or product.  Create consistency.

-Standards represent professional consensus on best practice, based on a wide range of experience.

Benefits:

-Improve quality and consistency of information

-improve compatability

-protect long term value of your data

-facilitate information retrieval.

Why so many standards: Many different communities, different needs in different institutions.

Thousands now agree on Dublin Core.  Many people using it; now can share metadata.  Never will everyone agree on one set of cataloguing rules.  Our own context and users in mind.  Try to still find common ground.

Key for us:  What is our point?  How will be fulfill our mandate?

-in library follow library standards.  Technology that will provide an interface and store it for us.  Catalogues all have same information but display it in different ways.

-LibDex: World Wide library catalogue.  List of vendors of software just for library catalogues.  $50,000 a year to maintain Ryerson’s catalogue.

-Many software options will be open for us to implement in a collection.  Eastman House uses TMS.  Different record structures.  Really expensive.  Price will affect choice of software.

-if using in house system, may not be able to link database to provincial archive database.  Becomes an isolated collection; less useful.  Lacks interoperability!

Interoperability:

-share information; usually by using crosswalks.

-crosswalks are translations.  like rosetta stone of cataloguing/database languages.

-need machines to read metadata.  So much of it that it can’t be done by humans.  too time consuming and expensive.  must be done by trained eye.

-if metadata is in a standard format it will be interoperable.  “Union Catalogue”  Slightly different schemes, but able to identify common piece of information.  Even if in different fields they can be linked together.  Don’t have to memorize, just know where to look.

-Don’t go with “simple solution”  Appreciate the complexity and don’t underestimate.

-Crosswalks: Go through fields and map it to Dublin Core from in house database.

migrating data to new platform so that people will be able to search it.

-Marc21 to DC

-North Carolina Dublin Core Template to transfer.  http://www.ncecho.org/ncdc/template.html

-no indicators in DC.  Transcription of title: Don’t use “the” or other indicators “a”

-”generate tags”

-dashes: Authors, American — 20th century — Portraits

Photographs of British Algae is a landmark in the histories both of photography and of publishing: the first photographic work by a woman, and the first book produced entirely by photographic means. Instantly recognizable today as the blueprint process, the cyanotypes lend themselves beautifully to illustrate objects found in the sea. The Library’s copy of British Algae originally belonged to Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), inventor of the blueprint process, among his many other photographic as well as scientific advances. One of thirteen known copies of the title, Photographs of British Algae was acquired in 1985 at auction directly from Herschel’s descendants.

Background

“The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects as minute as many of the Algae and Confera, has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves,” explained Anna Atkins in October 1843. Mrs. Atkins (1799-1871) was an amateur botanist especially interested in scientific illustration and taxonomy. Her goal in producing Photographs of British Algae was to provide a visual companion to William Harvey’s pioneering but unillustrated 1841 publication Manual of British Algae; to that end, Atkins’s specimen titles follow Harvey’s nomenclature.

Through her father, scientist John George Children (1777-1852) whose Royal Society circle included Herschel and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Atkins was aware of the group’s experiments with photography. Talbot’s “photogenic drawing” technique involved placing a flat object against a light-sensitized sheet of paper (sometimes pressed beneath a sheet of glass to prevent movement and ensure a sharp image) and exposing it to sunlight until the area around the object began to darken. Herschel devised a chemical method to halt the darkening and “fix” Talbot’s silver-salt image – the basis for all photography until the digital era.

Hershel experimented with other light-sensitive metal compounds in addition to silver, and in 1842 discovered that colorless, water-soluble iron salts, when exposed to sunlight, form the compound known as Prussian Blue; unexposed areas remain unaffected and the salt rinses away in plain water, leaving a blue ‘negative’ image. Inexpensive and easy to use, the blueprinting process, or cyanotype, is familiar today as an artists’ medium as well as a popular children’s pastime.

Atkins used Talbot’s “photogenic drawing” method, arranging her specimens on sheets of glass for easier handling for repeat exposures, and adopted Herschel’s blueprinting process, to generate the multiple copies of specimen plates comprising Photographs of British Algae. She also used this same method to produce title pages and contents lists instead of having them conventionally typeset. Atkins issued the work in parts, distributing them privately between 1843 and 1853; she occasionally supplied new plates as updates and substitutions when better specimens were available (for example, see the variations in The Library’s two copies of Part IV), which recipients all handled differently. Today British Algae survives in at least thirteen different copies in widely varying states of completeness. The Library’s copy is among the most complete; it is also one of the most rare for retaining its original parts’ wrappers and stitching.

Following the conclusion of British Algae, Atkins explored the cyanotype medium for more personal expression, creating assemblages of flowers and plants in elegant and sometimes whimsical designs. In some of her scientific plates one catches a glimpse of her ability to compose an arrangement in defiance of anything found in nature.

Related Resources

Armstrong, Carol and Catherine de Zegher, eds. Ocean Flowers; Impressions from Nature. (2004)

BBC. “Historic Figures: Anna Atkins.” (2004) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/atkins_anna.shtml>

National Museum of Photography, Film & Television. “Cyanotype Process.” (2002) <http://www.nmpft.org.uk/insight/downloads/CyanotypeProcess.asp>

Schaaf, Larry and Hans Kraus, Jr. Sun Gardens: Victorian Photograms by Anna Atkins. (c1985)

Ware, Mike . Cyanotype: The History, Science and Art of Photographic Printing in Prussian Blue. (1999)