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!