California Cultures Workshop Held August 6-7
On August 6th and 7th a two-day California Cultures workshop was held at the UCLA Library. Project managers and staff representing UC campus divisions (special collections and oral history units) participating in the California Cultures project, along with staff from UC Berkeley’s Library Systems Office (LSO), members of the OAC Working Group, OAC Manager, Robin Chandler, and the California Cultures Overall Project Manager Genie Guerard attended. Workshop sections included an overview of OAC Best Practice Guidelines for Digital Objects, database training, workflow procedures, and establishing project milestones.
Brad Westbrook, chair of the CDL’s OAC Working Group Subcommittee on Metadata Standards, discussed the Best Practice Guidelines for Digital Objects, developed by the OAC Working Group over the last year. Complying with CDL digital object standards, these represent OAC’s standard for describing and maintaining digital objects, and inform the metadata requirements of the California Cultures project.
Training was provided to the project managers and staff in the use of a recently developed web-based interface to the GenDB, a database developed by UC Berkeley LSO for inputting digital objects metadata and exporting XML-based METS objects. Rick Beaubien, Lead Software Engineer for Research and Development in UC Berkeley’s Library Systems Office, and Genie Guerard, Overall Project Manager for California Cultures and local project manager for the UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections, conducted the database training. To guide the project managers in use of the database, Guerard prepared an extensive manual which is available online through the California Cultures Project Website http://calcultures.cdlib.org [coming soon]
Robin Chandler, OAC Manager, contextualized the metadata input and export within the framework of the complete workflow cycle for the California Cultures project and provided guidelines for all tasks in the digitization process: selection of primary source materials to be digitized and their description; packaging, shipping, and tracking procedures; and communication lines among project participants. Chandler worked with campus project managers in establishing project milestones.
California Cultures will become one of the OAC’s digital research resources, focusing on the history of ethnic groups in California history. For additional information, see California Cultures Executive Summary, Library of Congress Grant, September 20, 2000 at http://www.cdlib.org/libstaff/sharedcoll/oac/,