Consistently Inconsistent

This week's conversation topic forces me to come to grips with the fact that I've been lax in maintaining any level of consistency in the collection I'm developing. I'm using the ERPAePrints Digital Preservation Subject Headings for the descriptive metadata. It's a useful classification schema, but I've admittedly not drilled down into the sub-classifications to describe my resources with more granularity. Without these distinctions, many of the resources I'm using end up looking very similar -- thus making them harder to retrieve with any usefulness. I would have liked to have brought this taxonomy into ePrints, but other technical problems left me in a bit of a time crunch and I didn't attempt that exercise. The use of LCSH proved to be less than useful as well.

Now, I admit. I'm not a cataloger. In fact, when I'm looking at the resources I'm adding to my collections, I get easily distracted and have a hard time remembering how I described similar resources -- reinforcing the need to have a controlled vocabulary from which to choose. I sort of look at my inexperience cataloging as an indication (however minute) of what might happen when you have a variety of different catalogers (or depositors for public repositories)

I'm dealing with a similar situation at work where we're creating a collection level directory of digital collections in our organization's membership. We're using the Omeka platform with the intention that, after the initial corpus of collections are added to the directory, librarians will be able to add other collections as they are created. One thing that I like about Omeka is that it provides data-entry guidance for users adding items to a collection. Not only does it give lay descriptions of the DC fields, but it also provides guidance for how the entry should be formatted (dates, names, etc...). It's essentially DC classification for dummies --