VCA Metadata Project

This year I've been doing some volunteer work for the VCA school of film, for it's 50th birthday. I've been collecting metadata about previous graduates and their final films, and filling in the information that I've gathered into a Google Sheet. It's quite simple work; I've been given two sheets, one with the information that the school already has on the film, and a different sheet to copy this information into, and to add any other material that I discover. There are some overlapping information groups, but the idea is that I need to find more information about the films and the filmmakers themselves. It's interesting work, and it's using some of the searching skills that I've developed through my studies.

My group of filmmakers all graduated in the years 2006-2010. So far, I've found an Emmy winning filmmaker, some freelance filmmakers, a couple of journalists, a convicted pedophile, and a few others who don't seem to have done anything film-related since graduating. I've been doing this since February, but it's great because if I have a lot of homework, I can put it on hold. I can also do it from home, which is ace.

The one issue is the number of graduates. Turns out there are over two hundred of them, and as each one takes me about twenty minutes, I'm going to be doing this for ages. It's fairly simple work, though, it's really more about Google searching.

Here's one of the graduate films which I thought was fairly appropriate for a blog about library studies, Bibliomania:

Google mapping

This map contains directions to the house that I grew up in, in the lovely town of Castlemaine. I've included directions by car, as well as a link to the Victorian Heritage database where there is a description of the house. It's a reasonably important place; built right around the beginning of the Gold Rush in Victoria, it was the old police station in Castlemaine as well as the last place that Robert O'Hara Bourke lived before he went off on his expedition (which didn't turn out well at all). The woman that my mum sold the place to painted the house blue, so if you go to the street view, it looks totally different today.

Originally I tried to embed the map using the google+ share button on the left hand side of the map, but I kept on coming up with a ginormous map when I tried posting it. So then I used the button on the bottom right of the page, which gave you sizing options, but that wouldn't keep the directions on the map. In the end, I used the first URL again and changed the sizing myself in the code, and I think that it has turned out fairly well!

This week I have also been working through the activities on Codeacademy, which I have actually really enjoyed! I think that a big help is being able to see the updates that you are making to the code in real time, so you don't have to refresh the page or submit your work to see where the mistakes are. Also, the badges that you are awarded as you progress really help, it gives you something to work towards and also break up the sections a bit more. I've posted a badge onto my twitter page, like a big proud dork.