Frobenius Metadata

The Frobenius (Courtney L.) Vietnam Research Collection was donated by Courtney Frobenius and is focused on the Vietnam War and Frobenius' experience in Vietnam. The bulk of the materials date to the 1960s and 1970s.

While the collection contains many different types of materials I only worked on the metadata for the photograph collection. A lot of the information that needed to be added to the excel file containing Frobenius metadata was almost exactly the same for all the items, but the titles, descriptions and subject headings were ones that varied more. As far as the titles and descriptions were concerned all that information was contained in the 'Photograph Log' in the Frobenius finding aid, and all that was required was to copy exactly what was already there.

The subject headings needed to be Library of Congress subject headings, so I needed to use the LOC site and, using the information provided in the description, search for correct and legitimate Library of Congress approved subject headings. Each item needed multiple subject headings, however, every once in a while only one or two subject headings could be used.

That was probably the most tedious and frustrating thing for me, trying to locate Library of Congress approved subject headings. It takes a lot of searching and editing search terms to find the right headings for the contents of the photographs. It can get confusing because a lot of the time you need to search plural and singular forms of a word to find what works, and that isn't always the first thing you think of- to change forms.