CHARTER

As we have been here two months now, we thought it would be a good idea to introduce ourselves on the blog and give an overview of what we’ve been up to since starting in January. We, as the digitisation team are comprised of Victoria Oxberry, the Digitisation Officer, and Victoria (known as Vicki to reduce confusion) Stobo, the Digitisation Assistant, our names being quite appropriate for a project on Victorian material, though we have been assured that’s not why we were hired. We are overseen by Ahmed Abu-Zayed but based in Special Collections.

The first week or so was spent undertaking inductions and getting to know the university and campus. We also used this time to begin familiarising ourselves with the equipment/software we would be using. As we had both used variants of much of this, most time was spent with the camera, playing with the different settings and basically getting to know it.

After this, we set up a formal testing plan and began keeping work journals to detail our experiments and their outcomes, any problems encountered etc. Looking back over these, it is easy to see why this has been a good idea as it documents our changing knowledge and in some cases the to-ing and fro-ing over what the best practice should be. It also highlights how you can’t just dive head first into a digitisation project without doing some groundwork first. Even now, we keep changing our minds on some things or realising something needs to be altered in order to work in a particular context. For instance, creating a file naming convention that fits the three different sources it’s a lot more complicated than you think it will be.

Metadata testing has been worked into this experimentation, testing out the different mapped metadata schemas and providing feedback on these (a more detailed blog on this will appear at some point, along with one about capture settings).

Out of all this, we have come up with best standards for most of the different material we will be working with, though these standards will needed to be tweaked here and there for specific items, but importantly, we have a solid starting point from which to do this. This has also helped us to get know the material and create a workflow specifically tailored to that material and the overall project outcome. It could also be carried forward into future projects, again as a starting point.

We have also now looked at most actual items that have been selected and have notes on how we will approach the capture of each one and the particular parts that we are to capture.

As the e-learning module is one of the key outcomes of the CHARTER project, we have prioritised items selected for the course this will be based on and are now about to embark on the definitive capture of these items.

Following JISC approval to use DSpace instead of Fedora, an updated project plan has been created and can be viewed here. http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/charter/documents.htm

The CHARTER website now contains all the minutes and actions from board and team meetings under the ‘Documents’ tab.

The CHARTER Project Board met for the first time on 10 December 2008. Advice was sought from the Board on topics ranging from the repository software, metadata standards and selection criteria, as well as on longer term outcomes which might arise from the project. The Board includes CHARTER’s institutional sponsor, the academic lead for the project and an expert in technology, heritage and education. Perhaps most importantly, the academic lead for CHARTER again underlined the teaching and learning needs that are driving the project forward.

On 29 October 2008, the CHARTER Project Board signed off the Project Initiation Document. Whilst considerable work has been ongoing in the background, this milestone sees formal agreement of the scope and effort required to complete this project. The final PID will be uploaded to the project website when that is fully operational.