LITA Forum Saturday October 6, 3:20
Frances Knudsen, Beth Goldsmith – Los Alamos National Laboratory
Our speaker discussed the experiences that they have had working with The Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library’s aDORe Repository. She spoke about philosophical side versus real world side of QA .
They run a repository on a home made system by Herbert von der Somple, and they ingest using batch mode in this repository of approximately 80 million metadata records, 1.5 million fulltext tems, and several million other complex digital objects from multiple data providers, internal publications, and OAI harvests.
She revealed the details of their QA efforts, discussing their successes and failures and decision making processes.
She gave several instances of human error that quality assurance may not find. And she also passed along several tidbits based on their experience, such as: one of the things they did was to give a style sheet to people who are looking at data – translating it to a form rather than making the cataloger look at the code.
All in all it was a fascinating tale of quality assurance principles and practice.