This week I started yet another project. Mark decided he would like for me to work on organizing the excel data sheet for the Race and Segregation Collection. The items in this collection have already been posted online and for the most part have all the metadata, subjects and tags attached to them. My job will be to go through the file and make sure that the data in the excel sheet matches what is online, and to update it if not.
The original file is a bit of a mess. Whoever worked on it didn’t upload the data for the files in order, instead just picking and choosing the files that were relevant to them at the time. This wasn’t a problem, however, many of the filenames don’t actually match with the document’s actual filename or with the name it was given online. It took awhile just to sift through what had and hadn’t been done.
Eventually I decided just to start over from scratch and update the data for each file in order. I refer back to the previous work when I can, but the filenames are so messed up that it’s not really helpful. I’ve gotten through about 30 files already, adding the subjects and tags from the web page into the excel sheet. I’ve found a few documents that I haven’t been able to find an online location for, so I’ll refer those to Mark and see if he can either find them or figure out whether they need to be uploaded.
I worked from home again on Friday and continued transcribing documents and writing this blog post.
