Moving to metadata

Software design

Oh dear, when I logged in to WP, I got a message saying it was being updated.  What, I thought, can they do to make it less user-friendly than it is now? It’s a powerful tool, but I really find it clumsy to use, like driving a car with the steering wheel in the back, and the windows on the top and bottom. Might be fast,  but…

Speaking of software, here is my assessment of what we are using so far:

WordPress: very complete, good for our limited use, but still more complicated than it should be.

Scanning software: great, intuitive.

Libguides: easy enough to do what we are doing, but a cognitive torture when I view it. Just too much of a jumble on the screen.

Photoshop: The industry standard is NOT a software you can just step in and use. And how is it possible that they haven’t enabled batch processing that is as robust as the freeware Jenn (our class heroine of the day) showed us?

Omeka: Good, straightforward functionality, but needs to incorporate a batch upload function for the Dropbox. It also ought to  provide at least a thumbnail of the item you are working on as you insert the metadata, and create a temporary title taken from the file name, instead of that stupid “untitled”.

I am glad we are doing the metadata discussion this week, because than we can move on with more confidence to the actual cataloging of our collections.