So we got the go ahead to submit our final paper as a zine for the capstone! Yippee!! We were even told that it would be a wonderful first addition to the MADH program, but were also cautioned to not take on too much work. Zines are a lot of work, but it does make the most sense for our project and furthermore, Jenna and I both like making zines, so it seems like the perfect medium to communicate the accomplishments of our work in grad school on the Zine Union Catalog. If anyone reading this wants to suggest content for the zine, please read this 12 hours / week post that goes into some detail about what we are considering for inclusion in the final capstone zine and comment there…or contact us at zinecatproject@gmail.com
In other update news, Jenna and our Openflows consultant were hard at work over the last week to create, adjust, and readjust the maps for ABC No Rio and Carnegie Library! I should take a moment to acknowledge that our MAP is indeed a map that allows for us to direct the Collective Access system to map metadata from a spreadsheet filled with lots of information about the zine collections into the appropriate fields within the Collective Access system, but it also stands for Metadata Application Profile. It’s also sometimes called a Crosswalk. The DPLA has a bit to say about the MAPs used for their system. Collective Access also provides information for understanding their Data Importer (as CA calls it).
When I arrived to co-work with Jenna his past Sunday, she caught me up on how she had been designing the MAPs (see image) and I used this technique to create the Barnard Zine Library map while Jenna finalized the Denver Zine Library map. (We had help from Farfel, ZineCat extraordinaire!) The map I created for Barnard’s collection was a Frankenmap! I borrowed elements from the two maps Jenna had already created (ABC No Rio and Carnegie), but also pulled from a CA-byMARCfields.xlxs file that Jenna had located at some point. It turns out that whatever I borrowed from the MARC map was not very useful, and caused a system error on the ingest, so I stripped it down and stuck with mapping directions from the ABC No Rio and Carnegie maps. This worked better and I was able to successfully upload 22 records from the Barnard collection. I then proceeded to upload a file that included 200 records. Success. However, it wasn’t an entire success.
According to Jenna, the Barnard collection is the most complicated, probably because it’s in MARC format (or maybe it’s one of the larger collections or maybe it’s just described really well). For example, there are fields in the Barnard Collection for the zine’s main title (245$a MARC field), subtitle (245$b), another subtitle (245$p), alternative title (246), and series title (830)! I was trying to map all these titles into the one CA field (ca_objects.preferred_label.name) and then all the records that had more than one title showed up “BLANK” in the CA system! Not such a success. But, at least it was caught before all 5,451 records were uploaded. For the time being, we will only be mapping the main title and “skipping” the other titles. Skipping is a command one can include on the MAP that tells the ingest process to ignore (skip) that area of the data.
Thus, this week, I will be working on finalizing the Barnard Library ingest and beginning the mapping for QZAP and Sallie Bingham, while Jenna will be reviewing the draft I put together for the final zine and making any additional suggestions for what should be included (or not included).
