Nifty resource

Came across a nifty resource today that might help in my cataloging:
The King's Theatre collection : ballet and Italian opera in London 1706-1883. : from the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection. Rev. and expanded ed. A catalog by Morris S. Levy and John Milton Ward. 2006.
We also have the previous ed. (2003) - PN2596.L846 K4 2003
It has information about productions and sheet music and looks like it could prove to be very helpful.

Cataloging

Worked on some more cataloging yesterday and today. Nothing terribly exciting to report.

Next week when I won't be able to spend time at the library I plan on doing some more digitizing standards research and some experimentation with Open WorldCat and sheet music records.

Hours Wed.: 2 (4:30-6:30)
Hours today: 2 (4:45-6:45)
Total hours completed: 62.5

Exporting, correspondence, reflecting, and more cataloging

Today I spent some time experimenting with Millennium and exporting, and writing what I discovered to Andrew, Cassandra, and Mark. As I had guessed, we don't have the 'Data Exchange' option for the sheet music supplementary catalog. Cassandra had been asking about delimiter characters in the exported records, and I had remembered seeing some options somewhere, but that was in the 'Export' function within 'Create Lists.' I didn't have a lot of luck with that when I tried a few weeks ago - I couldn't export the MARC records as whole records - had to pick and choose which fields I wanted to export. I recommended that we not bother trying to get the 'Data Exchange' option added since I'm fairly certain we'll get the same results we got with Innopac.

I spent some time reflecting and started a draft of a post called 'A few random things I've learned thus far...'. I'll try to finish that up tomorrow and post it. I'm sure there will be many follow-up posts to that one over the next few months!

I also started cataloging the next piece in the bound volume. Haven't done any cataloging in awhile, I kind of missed it.

Hours today: 2.5 (7:30-8am, 4:30-6:30)
Total hours completed: 58.5

Some random things I've learned thus far...

1) Correspondence takes lots of time. Also, it's not always easy knowing who needs what information when you're dealing with different people and groups of people on different levels with different aspects of a project. I think I tend to err on the side of giving TMI (though no one has actually complained about it to date!).

2) Knowing who to ask about various issues can be tricky - it's not always clear or obvious who has the most info/experience about something. It's not good to make assumptions about these things - ASK.

3) I will never, ever know everything I want to know about certain technological things. The best I can hope for is to know enough to get me through and to be able to talk somewhat intelligently with those who DO know. At least I'm curious about technology and WANT to learn, which unfortunately is more than I can say for many librarians (and lib. school students).

4) I like to do research, which I already knew! That's one thing that probably drew me to this field. On the job, you probably don't have the time to do all the research you'd like to do on important topics - you tend to have to rely on information and opinions and research of others. That's another thing I like about the library world - everyone is very willing to share information and best practices, and there is a very cooperative, collegial vibe (for the most part).

5) I'm learning about how to talk to people with different knowledge bases and experience. The digital library people I've been collaborating with don't have much of a background in cataloging, and I don't have much of a computer science/technological background (though I'd like to think that curiosity and willingness to learn can go a long way!) so you have to learn to meet halfway. You find new ways of explaining things, you can't assume anything, and you realize that you won't ever know everything the other person knows (and shouldn't need to - that's what they're there for!).

I'll add more to this as time goes on...

Scanning standards

Today I finished scanning the rest of the pieces I had cataloged, make some adjustments in the procedures, did some further comparisons on the brightness/contrast issue with grayscale, and did some research on other institutions' scanning procedures and standards.
It seems that most places scan at 300 dpi, some as high as 400 or even 600, and only a few that scan at 150. If you have the time (the higher the dpi, the longer it takes to scan), I guess it makes the most sense to me to start with 300 dpi for the archival image, and then you can create smaller resolution access images .
I may do some comparisons with the things I'm working on, trying at a higher resolution, to see if the difference is enough to warrant changing procedures. One place said they started at 300 dpi but then ended up changing to 400 dpi because they felt the difference was that noticeable. Another place claimed that 300 dpi was necessary (as opposed to 150) for clarity, detail, and color fidelity particularly in the printing version of the image.
So, I guess it depends on your resources and what your time frame is. Obviously, higher dpi will give you better results.
I want to look at a few digitizing guides that I found during my digital archives and records management class and my digital libraries class, especially the Howard Besser (Getty) one, since he pretty much is "it" in the digital archiving world.

Hours today: 2.5 (4:15-6:45)
Total hours completed: 56

Procedures

Today I spent some time on procedure writing. I wrote up the instructions for exporting from Innopac, and I also got started on revising the scanning procedures.
I think the StaffWiki would be a great place to keep these things, but I don't know what the plan is. Emily mentioned that they were planning on setting up a wiki page for the student work schedule, but I don't know if they'll be putting anything else up or not.
I also scanned the second piece in the bound volume, trying a slightly different brightness/contrast setting. The 4th page with the signature on it was interesting, since the piece it's attached to was bound upside-down in the volume. The signature was done as if the page were right-side-up, so when the scanned images appear it looks funny and like the 4th page is upside-down. It's accurate to how it is in the actual volume, though, and I think that's the important thing.
I also edited a few of my cataloged records, according to the answers to some of the questions I had asked Mark. I didn't find any additional information about "Signor Caravati," but I'm pretty sure he's the librettist who has the established heading "Caravati, Giuseppe,$clibrettist.

Hours today: 3.5 (1:15-4:45)
Total hours completed: 53.5

Exporting

Thurs. I spent about a half an hour with Mark trying the exporting options the way he was able to have III set it up. It turns out I have the proper permissions, and everything looks good! There have been some email conversations with the DL people about the characters used for field delimination in the text files we have, but hopefully those will be resolved next week when Cassandra hears back from DLXS and gets a sample record from them to compare ours with.
I need to write up a procedure on how to do the exporting - hopefully it will be useful to someone else in the future.
I'm planning on getting in a lot of hours next week since Gaylord won't be open more than usual weekday business hours the week after...

Hours today (yesterday): .5
Total hours completed: 50

Scanning training

Today Brad and one of the graduate student assistants took me through the scanning procedures. There is a written procedure, but it's a bit outdated, so one thing I'll be doing is updating those procedures. I did some practice scans and then worked on the 1st piece in the bound volume I'm cataloging. I discovered that for that type of paper and printing, the grayscale option worked the best. With black and white scanning, the dark spots were too dark and it picked up every little dark fleck and imperfection on the page. It just depends on the type of material you're trying to scan as to whether color, grayscale, or black and white will work the best. Sometimes it takes a little bit of trial and error and comparison. It's tricky trying to scan an older bound volume - it's not terribly fragile and the paper is in really good condition, but I worry that the all the handling will have an adverse effect. I guess that's one reason that it's important to do it right the first time, so that you don't have to handle it more than you absolutely have to.

I will also be looking at other institutions' scanning procedures and standards to see if what Gaylord is doing is comprable (I'm fairly certain that it is).

Hours today: 3
Total hours completed: 49.5

Cataloging

Saturday I spent 3 1/2 hours on cataloging. More details later...

I got a message from Andrew Rouner, responding to the email I had sent him about exporting problems. I need to respond to him today ( just a reminder to myself).

Hours today: 3.5
Total hours completed: 46.5

More cataloging

I went over some questions with Mark today and fixed up some things in the records I've done. No new ones started yet. I'll write more details later...

Hours today: 2.5
Total hours completed: 43