Hello,
My two cents worth concerning EAD production and issues we came across:
First -- this is how we created (and are creating) our EAD guides: The
University of Virginia Project tagged the text portions of guides
using WordPerfect 6.1 and later WordPerfect 8. The did and headers
portions of an EAD guide were created using web based forms. These forms
were then joined with the text portion in UNIX and parsed. We tagged
guides in simple format without tables etc.
In general, we would tag guides first and then fill in the web forms
after. The parsing would be a separate step. The time taken for text
tagging and parsing would vary depending on the size and quality of the
guide and the tagging. The web-forms would take the same amount of time
to fill out; I would estimate this step to be 5-7 minutes per form (faster
with cut and paste).
We didn't keep statistics for how long it would take to mark up a guide
but I have a general sense of how long it would take me to tag a given
guide -- after evaluating the guide for mark-up. What most affected the
time taken to tag a guide would the shape the guide was in to begin with.
That is a five page guide in great condition (no spelling errors; supurb
content and description; consistent formatting, etc.) would be easier to
tag than a one page guide with terrible formatting, etc. If I scanned a
guide in, I would have to contend with spelling errors and formatting
problems.
Another consideration in planning for time for tagging is the depth of
tagging. There is a definite time difference if you do minimal tagging
versus in-depth-tag-everything tagging. A one-page guide could take me a
about 2-3 minutes to tag if i tagged only basic elements but with the
in-depth tagging I usually do it takes me longer depending on how many
names are in the guide.
Also, I evaulated and proof-read guides my students tagged to get a sense
of how and what they were doing. This is another time factor. Plus one
student when she was initially training did a lot of mistakes. This ate
up a lot of time when she began parsing her guides (the time need to
correct problems and re-parse 'til the guide was clean).
These are some general issues. But I'll end before this message gets too
long. I'll follow up with some more issues and time approximations for
some of our guides.
The UVA project was a subcontract of the Berkeley American Heritage
Project. From March 1997 to Dec 1997, we produced 1090 guides.
Elizabeth Slomba
CLIS, Univeristy of Maryland
and University of Virginia intern of all-work
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