Born Digital: The Art of Archiving Photos with Script & Batch Processing

Presented virtually at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society of Georgia Archivists from 1:15 pm to 2:00 pm.

Abstract

In Summer 2019 a Metadata Librarian, a Special Collections & Archives Librarian, and a Web Developer went to a legal tech conference together. Having gathered ideas for running a script to facilitate rapid creation of repository content, they soon began a collaboration between UGA’s Law Library and the School of Law’s Office of Public Relations and Communications. Their goal was to automate the gathering of digital photographs and metadata from the school’s Drupal-based website in advance of the system’s upgrade and migration in order to batch load the images and related information into the new repository records. The result was a few PHP scripts retrieving thousands of media files from three different types of HTML-based galleries to preserve them while enriching related content in the other repository collections. The project has already brought increased visibility and accessibility to the site. The presenters will discuss the impetus of the project, the planning and structural decision- making process, examples of script code, the types of HTML galleries and media file types the project encompassed, sample metadata snapshots from script results (both before and after cleanup), the workflow and tools used to coordinate work interdepartmentally, detours along the way, including COVID-19 related blessings and setbacks, and show one of the completed repository galleries and individual item records.

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