EADers,
The question boils down to this: what are the relative merits of
including a lot of lists to an inventory as opposed to configuring the
lists as entity files and having them "called" for the display?
The specifics: The inventory of the George Perkins Marsh collection
consists largely of folders marked only "Correspondence month,year;" each
folder contains an inventory of the letters it holds.
We're half way through a project to transcribe the contents and scan the
image of the many of the letters, and we plan to attach them to the
inventory by adding the list of correspondents to the inventory and
attaching the transcript to the correspondents list and the images of the
original to the transcription. Like so (with greatly abbreviated markup):
<c01><head>George Perkins Marsh Papers</c01>
<c02><container>Box 4</con...><con...>Folder12</con...>
<unittitle>Correspondence</uni...><date>March 1872</date>
<c03><list><head>List of Correspondents, March 1872</head>
<item><date>1872, March 1</date><persname>Spencer F.
Baird</persname> to <persname>George Perkins Marsh</persname></item>
:
:
:
<item><date>1872, March 30</date><persname>Charles
Eliot Norton</persname> to <persname>George Perkins Marsh</persname</item>
</list></c03></c02>
In the above example the author's name will be a hot link which pulls up a
transcript of the letter, and in the letter are icons that will activate
the image.
By adding the data modeled above to the inventory, we will be adding
roughly 500 files of from 1 to 6K of data to the 100k inventory; lets
average it out and say we're adding another 1500k to that document.
Alternatively, we could create each of those lists (the <c03> . . .</c03>
parts) as entity files and have them called:
<c01><head>George Perkins Marsh Papers</c01>
<c02><container>Box 4</con...><con...>Folder12</con...>
<unittitle>Correspondence</uni...><date>March 1872</date><lb>
<rs723;</c02>
Disregarding the bother of declaring 500 entity files, does anyone have
any knowledge or opinions about the impact of either decision: load times?
display problems? anything?
Elizabeth H. Dow, Ph.D. [log in to unmask]
Special Collections -- Bailey/Howe Library
University of Vermont "Dare to be stupid."
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