Project Reflection & Summary

        For my final project, I have created a collection of survey materials that are representative of those that were generated as part of the first phase of a campus-wide assessment of data management needs that I undertook on the UH campus in 2010/11, although the documents and recordings that have been uploaded into CONTENTdm were created especially for this project.  The theme for the collection that I have created for my final project is UH Libraries Campus-Wide Survey Data.  The element set that I have created can be used for other campus-wide surveys that are carried out by the library.  I wanted to do something that could conceivably be applied at work.  I created three item-level records and one compound object record.  The compound object contains two items that have their own associated metadata.  Given the fact that there are generally a number of items associated with any  interview, I felt like it would be good to demonstrate how that might be organized using CONTENTdm.

        I chose to use CONTENTdm for this project for two reasons.  At the most basic level, it just simpler than working with an XML editor, and I see no reason to make my life more difficult than it needs to be.  That is not the only reason, however.  CONTENTdm is used extensively here in the library, as it is at other libraries. Since I have never had the opportunity to use it, I figured the experience would be good for me. CONTENTdm is actually pretty straight forward to use, so I have no real complaints with the technology itself.  It was a nuisance having to index every change, and there was some clunkiness around creating compound objects and subsequently editing the metadata for individual items within the object, but those are my only real complaints.  I think the biggest difficulty was more conceptual.  I found settling on the final element set very difficult.  I'm still not sure I included everything that is relevant.  It was also a challenge to make sure that all of my metadata entries were consistent.  I kept going in to tweek my metadata records because I felt like I must be forgetting something, and a number of times I noticed inconsistencies that needed to be corrected.  I can see how it would be very easy for operator error to creep into a collection.  The image associated with the audio files in the collection is very generic and annoys me a little, but I didn’t feel like it was necessary to customize it for this project.