Email 1-
Hi Tim, yep by the weekend sounds good. here is the web page I mentioned,

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/

If you enter any url into it and submit it provides the basic metadata for that site. It also allows allows you to elaborate and then resubmit to get richer metadata.

Take a look and see what you think. I think we should attempt to use all the fields (15 core DC) – possibly with the exception of rights management. How will we manage this????

Key words will be something we need to standadise- names of games, software etc time periods…………….

1980-1989
1990-1999

Pacman
Super Mario Brothers

Etc

Hope this makes sense?

Email 2-

I found Zoes comments tonight (wed)useful. Maybe we should stick to simple metadata. I think our two key areas for concern are keywords and description,

Also what do you think we should put for the creator , contributor and publisher fields? Both our names?

Maybe we need to emphasise the games and things like age and gender of the gamer to create a feel for the audio?

Things like positive/negative experience?

What do you think?

I recieved an automatic response yesterday saying that the people who do the transcribing are away till the 20-something’th, so I’ll try to find someone else quickly in Christchurch tomorrow.

Do you have the internet at your work? It would be quicker if you could try uploading & emailing the .wav file to me that way (although, I suppose it wouldn’t take very long if you just post a CD).

I’m 99% sure that we should go with the HTML+embedded MP3 option, over long metadata fields. As I said above, it’s the best way to ensure that the user is able to play the file and look at the transcript at the same time.

That site you spoke of sounds interesting. Because our transcripts will be html documents in their final format, it sounds like it should be easy just to put them up on the web for a bit and get the site to generate the first bit of the metadata for us. However, I expect that we’d still need to go over it and double check that the metadata correctly describes the content of the transcripts/MP3 recordings. There’ll also probably need to be slightly different metadata for the MP3s than for the html docs.

I am keen to learn more about how DC metadata actually works. If we get onto this part of the project as soon as possible, we can ask Philip for clarification when we run into the tricky questions.

And, yes, I think we should ask about anything that our narrators are interested in talking about. Certainly, hardware preferences and differences are probably quite an interesting part of the gaming experience.

So, as I said, I’ll organise someone to do the transcribing, with the idea that we should get the audio files to them by Monday the 22nd. (That should give you next week to work out how you’re getting them to me, if you’re recording yours this weekend)

Hopefully their turnaround is quick, because we won’t have much time left to finish the project.

For my part, I should get to work in the next week or so getting the interface and template HTML document for the Library polished up. That should cut time off the building stages at the end.

In order to work on this, as you have mentioned, we have to start deciding what the DC terms are that are going to be most important when describing the files – before we’ve even got the files themselves. I think.. pehaps we should make this our goal for this friday – to have come up with a list of DC terms appropriate to describing the content we expect to generate. What do you think?

I agree next Friday is good for the interviews to have been completed. I have 2 lined up for this weekend, so should be able to get them to you early next week. How would you like me to send these 2 you? On disc? I liked your idea for questions; they should be pretty easy to follow and allow the narrator as much elaboration as they want. Do we want them to talk about the machines and controllers they used? e.g sega Did they have preferences etc?????

Both of my narrators are mid 20s so their 80s game knowledge might be a wee bit light but we will see how we go.

I really liked the initial structure idea. I haven’t been able to get anyone to confirm whether or not DC has unlimited fields but it may be easier to create the Html page. I have been alerted to a great site that generates DC metadata for you from any URL so once we have all the documents ready (and have URLs) and have agreed on how much metadata we want then I can generate the metadata and email it to you (or if possible then I could add). As far as I know it then goes into the header of the html (?)

I like your idea of getting someone to type the transcripts and I’m happy to pay someone as well. Very sensible given the time constraints. What did the quote come back at?

I have already had someone interested in your secrets for adding audio files into greenstone so it looks like you are onto a winner J

Have you heard back from Philip?

Just let me know if I’m getting any of this wrong…………. It’s all a bit of a learning curve!

Rebecca