April Project Report

The project formally began on April 1st. The first few days were spent establishing the project office at the Faculty of English's building.

1. Recruitment
Interviews and selection tool place for the post of technical specialist on the project. Michael Louzoi will be joining the team on May 1st and will be responsible for the system design and technical architecture. Everett Sharp joined the project team on April 12th as the cataloger, working 1.5 days per week.

2. The Collections
Orders have been processed for the Robert Graves material at the University of Buffalo, and the Edward Thomas material in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Digital scans have been received and archived. Some experimentation was carried out on post-processing of derivatives.

A full list of the collections is now being finalised and will be completed at the first Steering Group meeting on the 27th April.

3. Metadata and Cataloging
Metadata fields were finalised and a review of cataloging software took place. Portfolio 8 was selected as the project's cataloging tool. Cataloguing and QA has begun on the images received so far, and tests have been carried out on metedata conversion to TEI P5.

4. Project Management
A wiki has been set up for the project team to record thoughts, meeting minutes, and other information to be shared. A blog has been set up to issue monthly progress reports. The team is currently reviewing project management software. The first project plan is due to be submitted to the JISC on 11th May.

5. Copyright and Permissions
Copyright letters are being finalised.

6. Events
Preliminary work has gone into the workshop being jointly run with the English Subject Centre in November. Project staff have attended JISC workshops digitization, copyright, and a National Archives workshop on teaching history.