Share in our discoveries across three projects as we work to provide the first intellectual access to our hidden treasures relating to work and labor in early 20th Century New England, the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair and its period, and Boston local TV news.

Monday, June 7, 2010

PBCore Items, Wrangling

Twenty-five collections are lining up to roll out to the public. Their item-level descriptions, the records that provide details of individual film reels, are coming along thanks to a Web-based system written for us by Jack Brighton in Expression Engine. PBCore's data structure requires us to track the reels' intellectual content, rights, physical instantiations, and prepare to offer images and video surrogates.

The first field is pbcoreTitle, which in this case is Charles B. Hinds home movies, Reel 10. The program automatically populates the URL title. The picklists are based on PBCore controlled vocabularies and customized for our use. It is very pleasing to be working with just the terms that are relevant to us. And we find equal delight in seeing accurate field names. The labels actually describe the elements, minimizing head-scratching time. Other fields include pbcoreGenre--the Hinds Collection is mostly amateur, except for five reels of the U.S. Signal Corps World War I production America Goes Over. The repeatable element coverageType allows for spatial and temporal content: the reel of workers in the A.S. Hinds factory was shot in 1925 in Portland, Maine.


Here's a formatted view of a single item-level record.


For a preview of the Charles B. Hinds Collection, go to this temporary URL. If it's not there, we're in transition to the public site and we'll be back soon. Images are yet to be added and the information around the edges is not complete. But we're getting there!

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