Week 7: Rosenwald and Writing Metadata

 

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. If you did not read the first entry of mine, my name is Hiram Davila. I am a student at the University of Central Florida and will be graduating this semester. This blog post will be following my internship with RICHES Digital Archive throughout the Spring 2023 semester.

 

This week was a step up from my last week and I am finally getting back into the swing of things. As I talked about last week, I fell behind a bit because I went on a trip and did not bring my laptop for 4 days. This week I was able to catch up on my reading and start writing metadata.

 

I have to admit, starting to write the metadata feels a bit overwhelming since I am looking at it for the first time. I have read the guide to help guide me through the process, but there are some obstacles I have ran into since starting. One of the problems I have, or rather concern, is that I am not putting enough information. For example, one of the elements to the metadata is keywords. I have put 8 keywords in thus far that directly correlate to the item I am writing the data for. I wonder how correlated these keywords have to be. In the interview, the interviewee briefly talks about religion, but that isn’t a main topic of the interview, should I put religion as a keyword though? Another element is called description and I am not sure how much of a description I need to write. Should I write enough to essentially hook someone into watching the interview, or should I write a detailed description almost to the point someone can read the description rather than watching the interview?

 

Other than metadata, there was another event that happened on Sunday that I went to. There was a History Harvest at the old Rosenwald School in Altamonte Spring. I was unfortunately late to the event, but I got there in time to see the whole community come together. There was barbeque lunch, the fire department was there and were interacting with different people and kids, the Sheriff’s department showed up and was giving out free snow cones and there was a bunch of alumni from the Rosenwald School that were reconnecting. RICHES was there to scan in documents or other materials that we could add to our collection or to take names for people who may be interested in doing so in the future. Seminole County also set up a station where people who wanted to could give short oral histories and we were given those videos to add to the collection.

 

Between going to the Historical Oviedo Colored School Museum event and the History Harvest, it has made me reconsider my thoughts on public history. While I have had an interest in it before, I loved seeing the community come together and being at the events. While at both events it was clear that people appreciated what RICHES was doing in making sure that all the information about the projects is public and can be seen by anyone.

 

The next event is sometime in late March and I am very much looking forward to going to that one (and arriving on time). I also hope to finish up a “first draft” of my metadata this weekend and get feedback on it so I can make a “final” copy and then move on to my next assignment.