Metadata Review

The ability to systematically seaarch and discover documents in the CDASH archive according to regular categories, keywords or according to map locations and spatial references, like address, neighborhood or historic district, all owes to the descriptive information that accompanies each Place or Document.  This descriptive information is also known as Metadata. 

At this pilot phase of CDASH it wil be very helpful to pick apart and criticize the form and the content of the metadata before the difficulty of making changes becomes multipied by the number of items that we wil be bulk-loading over the next months.   We have been maintaining a To-Do-List that has a sub-heading for suggested changes to metadata.  Don't be bashfull about making your own suggestions.   

Most of the metadata assigned to CDASH items so far has been gathered together by largely automated procedures with a minimum of intervention.    This has left many potential gaps (and sometimes errors)  in the metadata, for example when we have not been able to automatically discern descriptive information or the names of the Author of a document or the Architect of a building.   One of the purposes of CDASH is to provide a means of improving the descriptions for places and documents where time and interest allow.  

We will have training in editing and managing metadata soon.  In the meantime, I have prepared a couple of metadata specimens to demonstrate what a filled-in item description would look like.  

• A Place item:  East Cambridge Savings Bank
• A Document Item:  A Conflict of Values in East Cambridge

Have a look at the form and content of these two types of description and submit your comments, questions and suggestions to the CDASH team. 

Metadata Punch List

• Titles for registerd places should reflect the official name for the place rather than the address.
• Eliminate "Courtesy of" from the recommended bibliographic citation. 
• Add a Date Note field to appear below the Date Erected field on place items to insicate the source and other qualifying information for the of the date.  In the case of date or dates. 
• Remove underscores from CDASH Address references.
• Convert the assessor land use vocabulary to replace abbreviations with whole words in title case.
• Get rid of the little "eng" that shows up next to the "Place Type" field on place items.