A beautiful spring day…

… and I spent a good portion of it working on my sticker database.  After weeks of a few sporadic hours here and there to pull everything together, I can now account for about 2,700 individual digital image files for stickers scanned thus far.  The most difficult part in this whole process is finding where the files are located across too many different folders on different servers at SLU.  My fault.  I also have a bad habit of assigning “Final” to whatever documents/projects I’m working on, and if they get revised, I put “FinalFinal.”  Or “FinalFinal-Use this one.”  And “Final-old” on the original finals.  And so on.

To keep all of that straight, I have a running meta-metadata Excel spreadsheet so I know the status and location of image file folders.  Some images are scanned but not loaded into the ContentDM database software.  Some are in iPhoto.  Many stickers still need to be scanned.  And today, as I was driving home from school, I thought, “I wonder if Flickr would be the most effective way to make these stickers available online?”  The Library of Congress uses Flickr, e.g., among many other institutions worldwide.

I also made screen shots of my iPhoto albums and put the .pngs in Dropbox.

I kind of miss the shoebox approach.

Despite the tedium associated with this work, the best part is looking closely at all of the images.  Very closely.  There are endless ways of drawing connections among stickers, some that are obvious and others more poetic.

It’s all good.  Stay tuned.