Apr 07, 2016 Collections within Collections – Quilt Records, Hidden Stickers, and the Art & Science of Metadata Enhancement
One of the fun things about working in libraries is finding random additional objects that might enhance our understanding of an item, like scribbled annotations in an old manuscript, or an object pressed between the leaves of an old book.
We recently worked on cleaning up and enhancing the metadata for the Quilt Heritage Collection. This collection provides an inventory of quilts from a variety of time periods. The Utah Quilt Guild held documentation days from 1988-1994, gathering information about quilts people in the region had in their personal collections. The information about the quilts often includes a color photo, which is accompanied by a form that was filled out by a volunteer providing details about the quilt pattern, age of the quilt, type of fabric, and more.
What I found interesting while I was working on the collection was the variety of 1980s and 1990s stickers that were randomly stuck on the quilt assessment forms.
I find the stickers on the quilt assessment forms interesting for a variety of reasons. The first is that I lived through the sticker craze in the 1980s, so seeing the random stickers evoked a feeling of nostalgia in me. I also think the stickers placed on the forms provides a user of the collection with an additional story to consider when reviewing the items – were there small children hanging out while the Utah Quilt Guild was holding their documentation days? Did one of them bring their sticker collection along and start placing stickers on the first page of the form as a means of “helping” their parent?
From a descriptive metadata standpoint, these stickers provide an interesting set of problems. There are 1616 items in the Quilt Heritage Collection. When we were cleaning up the metadata, we wanted to make sure that certain standardized fields like date, subject, and description were completed in order to improve searching for anyone wanting to do the type of historical research that these records would support. There’s currently no information in the metadata for the Quilt Heritage Collection that indicates that the scanned PDFs also contain an additional collection of stickers from a specific time period. Setting aside the time to improve the descriptive information in this collection for 1980s sticker enthusiasts isn’t a high priority when there are many other new metadata projects or other collections that need more urgent metadata clean-up work. I also wonder where we would capture that additional set of information if we did have an inventory of stickers along with the quilt records. For now, just be aware that if you are researching quilts, you might easily come across a mysterious purple dinosaur just like this!
Written by Anna Neatrour, Metadata Librarian in the Digital Library Services Department.
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