Pioneering Women of NASA

About

Kristiana Weseloh

Pratt Institute - LIS 697

Museum Information Management

 

Scope & Source:

 

As a space enthusiast, I was thrilled to discover NASA's History website. Initially, I wanted to incorporate a variety of images to highlight the many amazing advances NASA has made over the years. However, after ingesting some images, I realized the collection was too broad. I decided to narrow my focus on the many women who worked at NASA. I discovered NASA also had a Flickr album 'Women of NASA' with many more images. My goal was to highlight specifically the pioneering women who broke barriers at NASA.

 

Resource Template:

 

My template contains 12 elements from Dublin Core. I customized two element names; Spatial Coverage was changed to Location as I wanted to use more natural language. I also changed Format to Digital Format to accurately represent the asset in this collection rather than the original. In addition, I rearranged the elements to have the most critical information presented first.

 

Controlled Vocabularies:

 

I used three for this collection, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Library of Congress Thesaurus of Graphic Materials (LC TGM) and the LC Extended Date/Time. I initially used the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), but ultimately decided it did not suit my needs. Many of the locations in the photographs list specific NASA research facilities. TGN does not have these locations and only using the state or city for the facility. I felt the city only did not enrich the record as much as knowing the specific research center so I decided to not use it.

 

Subject: I wanted to use LC Subject Headings as the formal classification system and the Tags for the informal, natural keywords. For instance, LCSH classifies these early NASA women as “Human computers” but LCSH only has "Mental Calculators" and "Women mathematicians" as terms. Therefore, the tags were important for the more popular term. In addition, I used "Female astronauts" in the Tags instead of "Women Astronauts" because I felt it was more of a natural search term.

 

Type: I only differentiated between photographs and space photographs.

 

Process:

 

Description: I utilized the information from the source and then also researched the person on Wikipedia for more information.

 

Date: I only used the information given from the source.

 

Format: The image was downloaded which allowed me to verify these were all JPEGS. I felt it was important to relay to users the specifics of the digital file.

 

Relation: I linked to the NASA history website for users to find the original collection.

 

Rights: I also incorporated a link the NASA's media rights guidelines for users to specifically understand their policies.

 

Challenges:

 

As I created my item set, I knew several fields would have the same information for every item. These are Creator, Publisher, Rights and Relation. I attempted to add this information into the item set in the hopes of it automatically applying to each item, but I could not figure out how to accomplish this. Ultimately, I had to manually add these to each item.

 

The biggest struggle I had was with the Identifier element. NASA's history website did not include any identifying information. I felt it was important to provide something for users. In some cases, I was able to find a unique # on the extension of the image in the URL. Many though did not include anything but the title. Therefore, I kept the title the exact same as NASA to retain the connection between my collection and the source. I was able to find some identifier information on NASA’s Flickr page.

 

For the location, I really wanted to catalogue the images in space, but TGN did not have any name authorities for any place in space.  I was left with the question do you use the the space shuttle as the location or Earth's orbit? I did not want to provide inaccurate informatino so I ultimately left these blank.