Composing descriptions
Advice about creating clear and accurate titles and descriptions for your records, and adding transcription information appropriately.
To ensure that your record contains the correct information and is easily searchable in the database, you should consider the Title and Description fields carefully.
Title
When you are composing the Title for your record you should use the English standard grammar for titles when it comes to capitalisation. This means the first and last word should be capitalised, along with major words (e.g., nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs).
The title should consist of the main subject of the archival record (e.g., feature, area of foreshore). A date can also be included in the title if you believe it is important to identifying the record.
Description
The Description of your record is an important source of information, please follow these formatting guidelines to give each record the same level of detail, and to make the data within the platform easier to use for everyone -
- Make sure standard English grammar is used in descriptions.
- Say what the record type is (e.g., photo, newspaper article, postcard etc.)
- If it's a photo/postcard mention the orientation that the photo is looking if known (e.g., NW, SE etc.)
- If it's an oral history, mention the full name of the interviewee, the date it was conducted and any important info about them (e.g., worked on the foreshore in the 1980's)
- State the date relevant to the content of the record (e.g. the period of time the oral history is referring to, or the change shown by an image)
- State what the feature and/or change is (e.g., exposed wreck, receded saltmarsh). Link this directly to the relevant indicator of change.
- Add any other interesting/ contextual information that is engaging or helps to tell the story of change.
- Try to add as much useful information as you can without making the description convoluted or overly long.
Transcriptions (When creating a record of Oral History or other Spoken media) -
- For accessibility, any audio file should be accompanied by a transcription. This should be added to the metadata of the file rather than to the description field.