Unit 9: Consistency

In my experience, creating the catalog or metadata record for digital objects take the longest of any steps in the digitization process and as result winds up being the most expensive part. Enforcing consistency during the process is also challenging. In the past, I have relied heavily on detailed manuals describing each metadata field and providing specific examples to try to maintain some level of consistency. Consistency is easier to achieve when the person creating the metadata record has to make a simple, black and white judgement that can be clearly explained in a manual. It is much harder to achieve when dealing with subjective description, such as assigning controlled vocabulary. Particularly if you have more than one person working on a project, it is unrealistic to expect perfect consistency. I have had some success with identifying records that are inconsistent, and then sitting down periodically with staff and talking through the differences and their individual thought processes to try and get everyone on as close to the same page as possible. It is a time consuming process which adds to the project length and expense. In the case of this project, it is somewhat easier since only one person is doing all the cataloging. It is surprising, however, how inconsistent even the same person can be from day to day. I think the different installations we are doing and re-cataloging in a sense of the digital objects in our collections is helping to expose the inconsistencies so by the time we complete our final projects the consistency level of our description should be rather high. That is not really a plausible tactic in large scale though, unless you are using sampling methods.