By Katherine E. Curran

 

RIT’s Cary Archive is a cache of international Travel Posters from the early 20th century. Our job was to take the information found on RIT’s Wallace Library’s website about our six posters and expand upon it. The problem with the original metadata was that it wasn’t descriptive and lacked an actual picture of the poster. Through the CMS tool Omega, each poster – and its image – was given a Title, multiple LCSH Subjects and an in-depth Description of the image. For example, if the image, like the Colorado Rockies poster I worked on, included three people on horse back in the foreground and five in the background the description must include the seven people even though they were dwarfed by the Rocky Mountains. All of this work was for the 2016 exhibition of these posters on RIT’s campus. Other metadata includes the Date, Rights, Contributor and Format to name a few. The increase depth of information the metadata helped establish enables people to understand what they are viewing and interest them further in the topic. Personally, these posters really made me want to travel to these place and therefore did their job as a mode of advertisement. If no picture was added to the original metadata, how were these poster supposed to do their jobs?

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