Digital Indexing work is more akin to art than science. Accordingly,
breaking down the process to a series of universally applicable steps or
elements is challenging. This is both
because of the nature of the work but also due to the fact that every project
we work on is different. Our clients’ placement on the digital spectrum varies--ranging
from brand new oral history projects where not a single recording has yet been
made to well-developed projects with large amounts of digital material that
need to be multi-dimensionally indexed. Breaking
projects into phases, tasks, or other elemental organizational schemes can be
done, but is not necessarily the most useful organizational indexing schema for
this type of content (if you know what I mean).
The indexing process can be described by the roles of the
people involved. These roles described are not mutually exclusive, but they do
comprehensively cover the phases of work necessary to get a project from
beginning to end. The following titles for the various “roles” are conceptual
only. In some smaller projects, one or
two people are taking on all of the roles. In other projects, several people
may take on a single role (for example, where volunteers are organized to create
annotations). These roles can be filled by people within or outside of an organization,
be paid or volunteer positions, and engage highly skilled and knowledgeable
people, or not. They are presented here
as a basic guideline of “who and what” is needed within an annotation/indexing
project, and each role will be described in more detail in their own post.
