Activity Seven: Demystifying Metadata

Description

In this activity, students will work with data in the A Woman of the Century Women Collection and come to understand why it is crucial to enter information into metadata fields.

Duration

One day

Objectives

To prepare students and other contributors to create item records
To give students practice mining through the A Woman of the Century Woman Collection
To explain why coding information is so important and worth the time investment
To have students experiment with searches on the A Woman of the Century project site

Materials

A Woman of the Century Women Collection

Lesson Plan Text

Soon, you will be creating your item record about the woman you are focusing on. There will be many fields to fill in, and you may wonder why all of that information is necessary. In earlier activities, you have learned that A Woman of the Century has no index. While it is possible to search by keyword, there is little uniformity within the biographical sketches. In the project, I have worked to facilitate comparative analysis.

Please answer questions and write responses in your blog.

1. Select one woman from the A Woman of the Century Women Collection.

2. Examine her record closely and write a one page reflection on your blog about the detailed information fields, the metadata, in the record and on your thoughts about including such detail in your item record.

3. Look at her Occupation(s) in WOC metadata field and then find as many people like her as possible in two minutes.

Discuss how you proceeded and what you found. What problems did you encounter?

4. Now, go to her Occupational Categories field and click on the broad occupational category that is most like the one you just searched for.

How many people did you find? Select three and compare their Occupation(s) in WOC field with hers. Write your comparisons/contrasts on your blog.

5. In a one page reflection paper on your blog, discuss what you have learned about working with metadata.

The Omeka team created a Search by Metadata plugin that allows users to search with ease. As you see, the item record creation takes time, but the results are well worth it!