Summer Plan

This blog post follows on and responds to Anna's excellent recent blog post on a potential to-do list. It's definitely true that we need to control our terms; first we need to make sure that we're happy with all of our current field names. Jon

So, a potential summer plan, slightly revised (and based on Anna's list):

1. Rachel and Jon meet to discuss finalizing fields and field names. (Done, last week.) Rachel revises Jon's notes on said field names.

2.Rachel, Anna, and Richard meet briefly to discuss finalizing fields and field names.

3. Rachel and Jon meet briefly to finally finalize fields and field names; Jon can then send them to Laurie, finally.

4. Anna and Richard, with guidance from Rachel, look through each field of each record compile lists of all the terms we've ever used to describe the books. Most of this will be easy, since we have the actual END website and our facets to refer to, but it will take time.

5. Anna and Richard sit down and create a list that displays both all of the possible terms gleaned from the records AND a selected standardized set of terms based on this list. Also create a list of formatting rules. (As Anna points out, the existing wiki bib guidelines are helpful but incomplete. To quote Anna: "Nothing should be left off; this should be The Guide to creating a .bib record. We already began this last year with our "Guide to Transatlantic.bib" wiki page, but it needs to be more current and detailed.")

6. Anna, Richard, Rachel, and Jon meet to finalize the the standardized sets of terms and formatting guide.

7. Based on this, we update the bib template.

8. This standardized list will lead to the creation of a glossary for the general public (written by Rachel, Anna, and Richard). It will describe the reasoning and meaning behind every facet/phrase we use. We should aim to get to this step by the end of this summer.

THEN we have two more tasks:

9.To clean up the existing records and

10. To add new records!

We can discuss the most efficient way to go about steps 9 and 10.

Anna points out:
Of course, it will be possible to add books to the database while we are completing these steps; it might make more sense to clean up the records first, so we aren't adding mistakes upon mistakes. (At the same time, I think it is important to get more books into the database as soon as we can, so I'm not sure what I think about this last part.) Since there are always characteristics of novels that fail to be defined by preexisting terms, we will certainly need to add more terms to the database as we go along; we can always add terms to our glossary with little trouble.