Digitisation Projects: Organising Information

Use a spreadsheet or a database to input information/data about your project. These will let you:

• Organise your data so that you can find it
• Sort your data
• Prepare your data for analysis

Fields may need to be repeated to reflect:
 

Multiple roles e.g.

• Name 1
• Role 1
• Name 2
• Role 2

Multiple events e.g. for a map collection:

• Date Surveyed
• Date Revised or Corrected
• Publication or Printed Date

Non-standardised and standardised form e.g.

• Place of Publication (as appears on item)
• Place of Publication (as appears in an authority listing)

Each element of information or data is called a “field”. E.g. data about a book will comprise a "record" and will include the following fields:

• Author
• Title
• Publisher
• Date

Decide on what fields you want to include per record, thinking about possible future analysis. E.g. if you have place/location information you will need to decide how you may want to sort and analyse this information e.g. by:

• Country
• County
• Town
• Townland

Depending on your requirement each of these elements will need its own field.

Organising your information / data at the most granular level will facilitate future analysis. 

So, for example, including separate fields for town and country ; or separate fields for birth and death dates (or start date, end date) will mean that each of those fields can be sorted / queried separately.

Please refer to UCD Library's Generic Template and Notes for more information:

UCD Library has a number of other guidelines that may be supplied on request:

• Name Construction Guidelines
• Date Guidelines
• Format Guidelines for Photographic Resources

Consistency is important in describing elements. So, for example, avoid the use of multiple versions of the same geographical name e.g. Rome, Roma; or date e.g. 1st March 1900, March 1st 1900, 01/03/1900, etc.

Consistency will help to ensure that your data can be sorted, analysed, transformed into other formats, etc.

To assist with this use an national / international authority controlled list of terms or standard ; for example: