ARCHIVES 2015

56,451 people. Their college classmates, their social standing, and their social clubs. Their academic fields and degrees, their honors and awards, their employers, and—by implication—how all those connections mingled, interchanged, and influenced the world. All of this is data. In 1930, it was affixed to 1471 printed pages, safeguarded between two sturdy crimson covers, published, and distributed. This session will describe the EAC-CPF exploratory project at the Harvard University Archives which evaluated the potential of EAC-CPF to encode this data in a parsed and re-usable way. While the SNAC project used machines to mass produce EAC-CPF, and Connecting the Dots created hand-encoded, jewel-like records, our project explored a middle way. We sought to discover if a machine could interpret a book and to discover whether EAC-CPF could carry the metadata load.

About the Author:

Kate Bowers is the Collections Services Archivist for Metadata, Systems, and Standards in the Harvard University Archives. She has held a variety of positions in the Harvard University Archives for the past 21 years, all revolving around metadata. Her interest is in realizing the potential of metadata and technology to allow people to do what humans are good at--exploring, learning, thinking, teaching, and sharing their ideas. Before joining the Harvard University Archives, she worked at Tufts University, the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division, and Harvard Law School.