¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Our team met yesterday and was able to make some progress on some of the back end programming that was perplexing us in addition to continuing our outreach to the ZUC Advisory Board and answer some additional design questions.  Once again, Eric Goldhagen joined us to provide some guidance on programming Collective Access within the cpanel.  Most explicitly, Eric was able to assist us with working out how to:

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• Auto generate unique ID numbers for the ZUC.  During the previous ingests of data, each record was assigned a “%” ID and we did not know how to set CA to auto generate the ID number.  There was some discussion of the additional metadata we need to have represented in CA and after some back an forth, we determined that each record in CA should have a unique ID that is not tied to the contributing institution.  So, using this help documentation, and with Eric’s guidance, we are now able to have each newly ingested record have its own unique ID.  The metadata specialist’s job this week is to clear out the database so that the data can be ingested anew with unique IDs assigned.
• That leads to the second milestone of the meeting, which was to figure out how to batch edit several records at once.  Early last week, it was determined that sets needed to be created within Collective Access to do any batch editing (or deleting), but it was unclear how to easily add items to any created set easily.  At first it seemed cumbersome to add an item title by title, but Eric showed us a way to query the database easily and add items to a set within the search/browse interface.  By Wednesday of this week, the records will be deleted so that more specific metadata records can be added.
• The group had a good discussion about what metadata needs to be included and found with any record in Collective Access.  The group now has a better understanding of various relationships and authorities within the database and why certain fields (i.e. creator or date) were not showing up in the object view interface.  We will continue to work on the interface so that the following fields are included in the object record:
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  • ZUC ID#
  • Name of Holding Institution
  • Unique Collection ID# – like a bib number in a catalog or an accession number from a museum
  • Title of Zine
  • Creator
  • Date of Creation

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 A big goal for this week was to set up the browse functionality which we have not yet been able to make fully operational.  A meeting with Liza Harrell-Edge, digital archivist at The New School, had to be postponed until later this upcoming week, so we are hoping that she can provide another perspective on setting up Collective Access in addition to helping us with the browse function since the New School Digital Archive has done a great job at setting up their browse interface.    

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Eric and the project developer had an interesting discussion about the limits of using the cpanel as opposed to the command line.  Attempts were made to set up command line access for the CA instance, but have not yet been fully realized on the developer’s machine.  An email was sent to Jim Groom to further establish this function and Eric will follow up with additional documentation to implement command line access.  

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 The project director continued working on our outreach strategy in general and specifically to the ZUC Advisory Board.  After setting goals, a timeline, and determining who should be invited to join the AB, emails have started to go out inviting scholars, librarians, zine librarians, zine makers, and technologists for participation and will be followed up this week with a three question survey about the catalog interface and design of the site so far.  Communication will then be made on a weekly basis where updates are provided about the progress of the project in one week and then a follow up three question survey sent out about the updates the following week.   

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 The group also discussed design and branding strategies.  The team designer will continue working on color schemes and finalizing the logo.  After attending Digital Fellows open hours, the team designer and lead developer were able to remove the default thumbnail image for objects within the search results field in addition to some other modifications.  This will continue to be updated as the group determines the layout of the site.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Lastly, and certainly not least, a discussion of the final project and the NEH DH Advancement Grant has been initiated.  The project director has commenced drafting the application and has developed an initial set of questions about the application process.  We will be sharing those within the next week and a half.  

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