After the meeting on Thursday, I made some changes to the survey. Some members of the group brought up some really important points. One was that we need to take into account the difference between item-level cataloging and collection-level cataloging. The survey as written before would not have been able to capture that. There was also the issue of whether Photocat was primarily a cataloging tool for the collection or an end-user discovery tool. With this information, I went back to revise the survey. I added a question to the survey that would hopefully provide answers from the collection managers about whether their collection included information that was not anywhere else. I also added a Venn Diagram accompanied by a question that asked whether Photocat shared information with the collection's external records. Lastly, I added a two-part question that asked if the following metadata fields (that are currently used by at least 50% of all collections) would satisfy the core set needs and if not, which of the following would. We hope to get this survey out right after Thanksgiving.
Another thing I did this week was think about indexable fields for Photocat. After reviewing how the collections use the fields, and considering what kind of information could be easily searched for, I narrowed a list down to 5 indexable fields: Country, Date Taken, Creator, Topical Subject and US State. After discussing with other members of the group, it seemed like most everyone had come to a similar conclusion.
Lastly, I did a bit of review of Schematron this week in order to keep it fresh in my mind since I will be picking that back up in January. Now that I know what I'm doing, it should be easier.
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