In 2011 the Lowcountry Digital Library at the College of Charleston decided to replace their CONTENTdm installation with an in-house built Drupal/Fedora/Hydra-Blacklight system. While building the system was difficult, the metadata migration has proved to be the most trying and time consuming aspect of the whole procedure. The DAMS conversion provided the impetus for an in-depth digital object and metadata analysis, and the results were not good. The existing CONTENTdm schema was a mix of qualified and unqualified Dublin Core and in desperate need of normalization. The open source ingestion method for the new system (Rutger's OpenWMS) was in beta and only accepted MODS and METS. After evaluating our options, it was decided that now was the time to fix all of LCDL's 50,000+ records and convert to MODS. LCDL's resources were limited. Conversion began in earnest in the summer of 2012. We have to date normalized, rectified and migrated over 40,000 items with only the use of un-paid interns and one part-time library student employee. In this presentation, I will discuss our metadata normalization problems, how we trained free/cheap student labor and what lessons were learned in the process.

1. Heather Gilbert
Digital Scholarship Librarian
College of Charleston
Metadata Migration From System To System &
Schema To Schema On The Cheap

3. Help Me OpenWMS
You’re My Only Hope
 Only Ingestion Client We Could Find That Allowed
Batch Tab-delimited Text File Importation
 Only Maps From Marc, Mods In-house Text
 49,898 DC Records To Migrate
 Correction:
49,898 Very Messy, Poorly Formed
DC Records To Migrate

4. SOFTWARE
HARDWARE
TRAINING
MIGRATION
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
$0.00
INTERNS & VOLUNTEERS?
THOSE I HAVE

5. “Chicago, Illinois. As each car goes by his window at an Illinois Central Railroad yard, the engine foreman checks it against his switch list.” Library of Congress
PPOC, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001013227/PP U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black & White Photographs
(http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html)
 Assessment
 Documentation
 Training
 Communication
& Shared
Migration Plans

6. ASSESSMENT IS CRUCIAL
 What Needs To Be Done?
Metadata Migration
Metadata Rectification
Training Materials & Workflows
 What Resources Do You Already Have?
CONTENTdm Batch Edit
 If You Don’t Have It, Can You Find It For Free?
No Excel? OpenOffice
Can’t Script Your Clean Up? OpenRefine
No BaseCamp?
TeamBox, GoogleDrive, DropBox

7. DOCUMENT EVERYTHING
 Workflows
Graphics Help!
 Make Your Own Manual
New Software?
Include Screen Shots
Is It Easy To Follow?
Have A Newbie Test It
 Crosswalk It Out!
Not Just Schema To Schema
Make It Hyper Specific
Keep It Easy On The Workers
[Medieval scribe Jean Miélot, sitting at a desk, making a copy of another book], http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006680149/
Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

8.  Have Training Packets &
Technology Ready
 Be There For Your Workers
 Prepare Yourself For The Worst
 Flexibility Is Everything
 Deal With What You’ve Got

9. Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0074493. Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.
IT’S ALL ABOUT COMMUNICATION
 Project Management Software
Teambox
 Google Spreadsheets
Color Coded
Use To Chart Progress
 Shared To Do Lists
Trello
 Keep Management Informed

10. PROJECT MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION
 Trello https://trello.com/
 TeamBox https://teambox.com/
 Google Drive https://drive.google.com
METADATA RECTIFICATION
 OpenRefine http://openrefine.org/
 OpenOffice http://www.openoffice.org/

11. Heather Gilbert
Digital Scholarship Librarian
College of Charleston
gilberthj@cofc.edu @LCDigitalLib @ItsALikelyStory