This week, we were introduced to Omeka.net during class. To share my soldier’s stories, I will upload the documents provided to us by the Blenheim House on Wilhelm Kurz. The process of uploading each individual document is simple, but becomes tedious because of the metadata one must record for each document uploaded. Metadata is, essentially, data about data; it provides a viewer of a data set information on how the data is formatted, how it was collected, who the author was, the date of creation, etcetera. Metadata seems to provide context for the documents we share, that way viewers of our websites can fully understand the data being presented.

For the two additional documents to be uploaded for homework, I chose to upload Wilhelm Kurz’s marriage certificate and then his death certificate. The metadata I provided for each “item,” as Omeka calls the uploads, included author, source, publisher, rights, title, subject, identifier, date, and language. The source, publisher, and rights for all of the documents were, the National Archives, Blenheim House, and http://www.archives.gov/faqs/index.html#copyright, respectively. The author of Wilhelm’s pension records and his marriage certificate are Wilhelm himself, and I indicated the coroner as the author of his death certificate. The “language” was the file type, which is JPEG for all the images I will be  uploading to the website. One important thing that I learned about metadata was the importance of consistency. In order for the metadata to prove useful and searchable, the way in which I type and identify things . For instance, if the source is the National Archives, I need to type it as “National Archives” for each document, not a combination of “the National Archives,” “national archives,” “National Archives Washington, D.C.,” etcetera.

Metadata is useful and simple to input, but may prove infuriating when attempting to upload over 30 documents to a website, each requiring a slew of individual metadata information inputs!

This week, we spent time discussing the significance of secondary sources, as well as the pros and cons of digital storage. We also discussed online security, passwords, and personal archiving.  Personally, the class session opened my eyes to how much more careful I need to be about archiving the important information on my computer. The most “archiving” I’ve done is synced photos from my phone and saved them onto my laptop’s hard drive. I had no idea that if something happens to my laptop, there is essentially no way for me to ever access those photos or documents again. In the very near future, I plan on saving a bulk of my files onto some kind of “cloud” program like Professor Robertson mentioned. This way, if something happens to my laptop the information, like photos and old essays and medical records, will still be accessible and usable.

In terms of security and passwords, I definitely need to be more cautious. I have a habit of reusing the same two passwords tirelessly. Without going into too much detail here, I can say that I am also guilty of attempting to make my passwords more “foolproof” with capital letters and numbers, but apparently hacking software has caught up to these commonplace tricks, so I need to become more creative. On the bright side, my passwords do not include personal information or guessable dates anywhere. In terms of other security, I use a Mac and update it at least one every two weeks (it asks me to much more often), but do not have any extra anti-virus software running on the laptop. I do, though, disable cookies in all my internet software to ensure my computer won’t get a virus through that avenue. Overall, I need to work on making major improvements in my digital security.