I’m writing this around the halfway point of the summer, which is such a surreal thing to put on paper (on… Google Doc?). I simultaneously feel like we have made so much and not enough progress on this project. Since my last blog post, we have completed metadata for and uploaded our first items to the AAP Scalar platform (shoutout to Deja!) and this was one of my main goals for this summer, so I’m really satisfied! I have also made a lot more progress on the metadata creation workflow (with a lot of major tweaks in procedure that have taken place since I first started working on this project) and I think it is approaching the way it will look when future AAP team members work on this project.

Wow, that’s also such an unreal thing to think about! I can’t believe we are setting the foundation for future students who will be working on AAP. This had felt like a lot of pressure at first (and it still does, I think) but I am more optimistic and excited now than I am nervous. I am learning to view this lack of preexisting guidelines not as a reason to feel like I have to get everything correct the first time, but rather as permission to try things out and maybe (inevitably, fortunately, routinely) mess up.

Before my next blog post, I’d like to have all the currently digitized objects that are in the drive on the metadata spreadsheet. I know this is ambitious and that I might be disappointed if I don’t meet this goal, but I have faith in myself and in the team members who are helping me with metadata creation! Until next time, I will keep chipping away at these digitized objects.