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Hello, and welcome to this screencast on the Curator's Workbench. This is Jennifer Martin
from the Carolina Digital Repository.
In this screencast, I will provide an overview of the Workbench's purpose, capabilities,
and features.
The Curator's Workbench is an open source collection preparation tool for digital materials.
The Workbench helps you prepare arrangements of files and metadata for ingest into an institutional
repository or for storage in a dark archive.
As files are captured, arranged, and described, the software generates a METS manifest.
The software is supported by the Carolina Digital Repository at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Workbench is built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, which is open source and
extensible, allowing for customization of the Workbench to better match local needs.
The Workbench has a number of different abilities to help with arrangement and description,
including projects, crosswalks, metadata dictionaries, and web forms.
All these things revolve around the digital objects.
There are two main steps to how the Workbench handles digital objects.
First, the Workbench links to the original location of the objects, and second, it captures
the objects.
When items are captured, they are automatically staged and checksums and unique identifiers
are generated.
The digital objects are not imported into the Workbench itself; instead, the Workbench
creates a listing of their structure.
The file list, also known as a manifest, can then be rearranged without affecting the physical
file locations, allowing you to safely explore the collected files and modify their arrangement
without worrying about inadvertently modifying or deleting the actual objects.
Files in the workbench are divided into projects within the work space.
Each project can contain links to the original digital objects, the arrangement of captured
objects, metadata crosswalks, submission forms, and metadata dictionaries.
Projects can be exported and imported as .zip files, allowing them to be easily transferred
between users or computers.
Metadata crosswalks map user-supplied metadata to MODS elements; the Workbench tool allows
you to visually define how each MODS record is created and how it links to your captured
objects.
This includes specifying which MODS elements are used and where the values come from in
the supplied metadata.
The generated MODS records are stored in the METS manifest.
This feature allows you to migrate hundreds or thousands of descriptive metadata records
at a time and link them to objects without having to create new mappings for each object.
Crosswalks can also be copied between projects, allowing them to be reused as needed.
To help streamline the process of creating crosswalks, you can create metadata dictionaries.
Dictionaries package your most common mappings and patterns for MODS elements into discrete,
reusable blocks, so that you don't have to recreate the mappings for each project.
You can share the dictionary files among colleagues via network drive or point your workbench
at dictionaries on the web.
The form design tool helps you quickly create web forms to collect digital objects and metadata
for user-deposited materials.
Forms map input fields to MODS elements, using crosswalk components.
Forms can also include explanatory text, enforce required fields, and draw from controlled
vocabularies.
Forms work in tandem with a server-side form-hosting application, which can be configured to put
uploads and MODS records into a folder or to deposit them into a repository via SWORD.
Projects, crosswalks, metadata dictionaries, and forms all combine to create a dynamic
work flow that helps with the arrangement, description, and ingest of digital objects.
The Curator's Workbench is freely available at lib.unc.edu/software.
For more details about the various functions of the Workbench and instructions on how to
use them, please see our other screencasts.
You can also visit the CDR site to see live examples of Workbench-created collections,
the GitHub repository for code, or our blog for release information.
Thank you for listening, and have a nice day!