As we get closer to welcoming the new year, we are amazed at how quickly the past couple of months flew by! Since our last update, we have moved beyond the processing and digitization phase and into building up the metadata – creating as much descriptive and logistical information about each item in the collection as possible. Using Dublin Core as our metadata standard, we have been creating titles, dates, rights and publisher information, as well as lengthy descriptions to help users understand the digitized items. With the metadata complete, we are in the process of designing and curating the website.

We have over 400 items in the Documentation Studio collection ranging from documents to images and videos. Today, we’d like to give you a better idea of the size and scope of the collection. We’ve created some charts to help visualize the Documentation Studio’s materials.

As visualized below, much of the items from the collection are in “Image” formats (e.g. JPEG). “Documents” (e.g. PDFs) come in second with 156 items. There are 29 “Moving Image” (videos, films, MP4) items and several web-based items that are categorized under “Website.” We hope that this graph can provide a general overview of the formats that the Documentation Studio collection houses.

The following pie chart displays the type of documentation and materials we have, organized into broad categories. These broad categories include school levels (toddler, preschool, kindergarten) museums, college courses, history of the Documentation Studio, and conferences. Looking at the chart, Kindergarten documentation comprises 26% of the entire collection compared to other school-level categories with 2-6%. There is quite a bit of material in the Making Learning Visible Course category as well as in Museums.

We hope to envision more relationships between various pieces of documentation in the collection. One particular metadata field that will provide even more access points for users is the “Subject” field. With this metadata element, we can create controlled vocabularies and keywords which can then link and bring together items outside of its categories, age ranges, and formats. After consulting with a team of colleagues, we’ve compiled a list of subject terminologies, such as small moments in learning, child-led, teacher-led, and descriptive terms to illuminate the documentation including social emotional skills, sensory play, motor skills.

We are excited that our long-time Doc Studio colleague, Saameh Solaimani, has agreed to collaborate on the website design. Sarah has worked diligently to build the back-end of the website and now Saameh will consult on the front-end to make sure it is user-friendly.  Saameh is an early childhood education specialist teaching at UMASS Boston and is the family support coordinator and grant manager at the Children’s Center at the University of California Santa Barbara.

We are very excited to share this website with you in the new year – stay tuned!

-Sarah Yasuda and Stephanie Cox Suárez