PWFC 2024-03-25 to 2024-03-29
to : Martin Holmes
Minutes: 185
On Wednesday, met with the archives cluster and discussed file and folder naming, conventions for metadata, and other plans; this is an outline of what I took from that meeting, along with my TODOs, as summarized for the cluster on Thursday:
- I’ve updated the Protocols document (instructions for file and folder naming and organization) to comply more closely with standards such as ISO 3166. I’ve uploaded my copy to the shared Google Drive folder. TS (and anyone else who wants to) can review and edit this file , and when everyone is happy with it, I’ll integrate it back into the PWFC svn repository. The version in the repository, which SK can see, includes all my changes so far.
- SK and I will liaise to figure out what needs to be changed in the existing file/folder naming on the server, and PWFC metadata, to align with these changes.
- Once the document is ready, we’ll circulate it to all researchers who are collecting materials and confirm with them how they would like to provide materials to us. If they are comfortable with using the UVic VPN and FileZilla, they can upload the materials themselves; if not, they can provide them in a shared Google Drive folder, and SK and/or I will check them for filename compliance and upload them.
- There are already many files up on the server which violate all the rules. I will write a diagnostic process which runs once a day and generates a web page listing any bad folder or filenames, along with the id of the person who owns them; we can let uploaders know about this and ask them to fix problems with their own files.
- I will investigate possible ways we can make some or all of the files available for easy browsing by other members of the team, even those who are not uploading files of their own. There are various ways to do this, and some security concerns. My feeling at the moment, after thinking about it overnight, is that we should do this:
- Researchers upload files. Their names are confirmed as correct or fixed by myself or SK.
- SK creates XML metadata records for those files, based on information provided by the uploader.
- Periodically, we copy all files for which we have correct metadata into a public folder where they can be browsed. That means we’re only publishing files which have been checked and described (although I’m not suggesting we publish the metadata too at this point; this is just a convenience for identifying when files are ready to be shared).
- We discussed the relationship(s) between the existing LOI archive and the PWFC material. My understanding of that at this point is:
- The PWFC spotlights will have their own distinct website, which will be linked from the LOI archive site (and hopefully from lots of other places too). The spotlights will all be translated into the three languages.
- As much of the material gathered by researchers as possible will be integrated into one or more special subcollections in the LOI archive itself. These records will not be translated. They will include full versions of documents from which extracts appear in the spotlights, and in those cases, we would want the spotlight page to be able to link back to the full sources in the LOI archive. That means that researchers working on the spotlights need to track their source documents and provide precise citations in the spotlight content (as we hope they would as a matter of course), and those citations will need to be tied to the specific identifiers for those documents in the LOI archive.
- We do not yet know what the configuration of the subcollections in the LOI archive might be. We might have a single subcollection for each spotlight theme, for example, or we might organize the subcollections by country; or we might have a single large PWFC subcollection housing everything. It’s for the archive cluster to consider what works best, once we have a clearer idea of how much material is coming in, and what it looks like.
- We might also consider links going in the other direction; in other words, in the LOI archive metadata for a specific document, we might include the information that it has been cited in a spotlight, and provide a link to the spotlight.