Cataloging with EPrints

Well first of all, I must say that I enjoyed entering items into a digital repository using EPrints. The process was pretty straightforward and user-friendly. I especially enjoyed the automatic-fill feature that remembered previous field entries. I also liked the built-in LCSH feature for the subject headings. Overall, as I discussed in more detail in my discussion post for this week, EPrints mapped well to my application profile for my digital collection.

Regarding the question of consistency in my approach to cataloging using EPrints, I feel that the tight match between my application profile and the EPrints default categories and features was sufficient to ensure a reasonable degree of consistency among items in my repository The auto-fill feature ensures that I do not have redundant variations of the same name on the creator and publisher fields. I wish the auto-fill functionality could be extended to the keyword field as well, because this is the most vulnerable area of my cataloging approach in terms of consistency. The main problem I encountered in tagging the keywords for my items was the potential for alternate versions of the same word due to hyphenation. For example, I use the prefix "post" for several keyword entries such as "postmodern" and "post-custodial". In the word content of the items I think there is variation between the "post-modern" and "postmodern" spellings of the word. I tried to overcome this problem by entering both version of hyphenated words so that end-users will get the same result regardless of how they search. Another slight problem I encountered was the lack of precision in the built-in LCSH categories. The default EPrints LCSH are very broad--I suspect there might be a way to update EPrints with a module that would expand the LCSH so that I could label my items with more accuracy.