Meeting Report: June 30, 2020
by Amy Thiessen (Project Manager) and Claire Halston (Podcast Collaborator)
Collection processing—which includes digitization, metadata entry, and transcription—is a core part of the work that UBC Okanagan’s SpokenWeb team has been dedicated to over the past 12 months. UBCO SpokenWeb team members that have spent significant time on this endeavour are Megan Butchart, Lauren St. Clair, Amy Thiessen, Craig Carpenter, and Karis Shearer (Megan has surpassed the rest of us by a landslide from a numbers point of view!—and is our resident expert in collection processing.)
Megan Butchart is nearing completion of the first phase of transcribing our local SoundBox Collection. The collection processing effort will shift focus towards working through the content field guidelines in SWALLOW, the SpokenWeb Canada metadata ingest system. We will be exploring the potential for using nesting techniques (for example, placing an instance of audible laughter in a recording in square brackets) as an alternative to a more traditional time-stamping method. Our team is consistently working through challenges that arise out of being one institution among 13, when each institution has local collection(s) with unique properties. This week our team is thinking about why “rule-generated” approaches can be challenging, and as a result we are imagining the possibility of developing more than one system of content fielding.
The podcasting team has been hard at work preparing for our next episode of SoundBox Signals. While we won’t share too many details regarding the upcoming episode as this point, we can announce that the team has been putting together plans and materials for upcoming interviews; SpokenWeb team member Lauren St.Clair and another special guest are scheduled to appear on the episode. See this previous blog post for a bit more sneak-peak information regarding the next episode.
Our podcast team is also excited to announce that the SpokenWeb Podcast will be re-releasing our fourth SoundBox Signals episode—“Is Robin Here?”—on July 6th!