True Confessions: My Digitization #EpicFail aka how we turned my mistake into a #WinWin!

In our professional careers, we all make mistakes sometimes and last year I made a BIG one…  Here in the ARCHives, we refer to that unfortunate day one year ago today as #426—as disaster—April 26^th, 2017. 

First, I will provide some clarification.  ARCH is an Islandora installation, developed by PALS.  As an administrator of ARCH, I monitor, approve and publish digitized objects that my student workers scan and describe in the Simple Workflow Utility Module.  This gives both my student workers, and myself, the opportunity to edit digitized images before they “go live”.  As you can imagine, some objects need more work than others.  Some images may sit in the Simple Workflow for a while before I get a chance to edit or fix it.  Such was the case that fateful Wednesday in April 2017. 

Now let me set the stage for this blunder.  One year ago today, on Wednesday, April 26^th, 2017, I was working away—answering questions from my student workers, talking with colleagues, etc.  I made the poor decision to review my exploding Simple Workflow queue at that time.  A time when we were very busy.  I quickly selected all of the images that I felt looked suitable.  Surely, I could quickly breeze through my Simple Workflow queue and publish those objects/images that look appropriate, right?  I quickly selected and published what I thought to be only my selections in the queue…

At the bottom of the Simple Workflow queue are the following buttons.

Sample only.  On that fateful day, April 26, 2017, the number was 2,000+.

I quickly confirmed and PUBLISHED the objects/images. 

Yep, I selected Publish All.

Hmmm, 2,000+ objects/images, that seems like A LOT.  After publication, Islandora brings you back into your Simple Workflow queue…EVERYTHING IS GONE…  I HAD PUBLISHED THEM ALL!!!

“No.  No, no, no” (And yes, those were the exact words I uttered.).  I refreshed.  I hard refreshed.  I even tried the control-z.  Crazy I know.  I closed my browser, reopened and checked again.  Still gone.  I even opened another browser and checked again.  Empty, gone, gone, gone…

Anne's reaction

I contacted our vendor PALS.  Nope, apparently in Islandora you cannot pull them back into the Simple Workflow.  I had literally unleashed Pandora’s Box!  Objects/Images with grammatical, spelling and incorrect metadata.  Objects/Images that were sideways, objects that we were waiting on Donor Agreements prior to publication.  In other words, a true HOT MESS!

After a sleepless night, I had to come clean and figure it out.  I confessed to my supervisor who very understanding considering the magnitude of this mistake.  In addition, I started to figure out how to fix the mess that I had created.

I created a review log.  For those of you that know me—you know how I love a log!  My two student workers and I reviewed/browsed each page that contained twelve images per page and noted each image that needed editing.  All misspellings, grammar, sideways and downright wrong images recorded in a large Excel spreadsheet with links to the offending image.  Then we went back and got to work.  Fixing, editing, replacing images and logged that information in our Clean-up Spreadsheet.

How long did it take us?  Surprisingly, the first review only took us about two weeks.  The actual clean-up process took much longer—closer to two months.  Once I developed a plan to fix this hot mess and during the clean-up process, I began to feel better about it.  Some of these images had been problematic.  Many were a part of our digital collections since the beginning and probably migrated from our original CONTENTdm installation to our current Islandora installation.  Islandora allows for many options of editing including download and replacement of the original image, which was super helpful for the sideways images. 

The moral of the story?  Looking back, I now realize that ARCH is in better shape than ever.  Does that mean that we do not have any problems with some of the objects?  No, but I have refined my process for clean-up.  I have now formulated new clean-up processes.  We turned lemons into lemonade.  Even though the debacle seemed like a disaster, I now realize it was not life or death.  I created a calamity but with the help of my two student workers, we resolved it.

Anne Stenzel is an Archives Technician specializing in digitization at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Comment below with suggestions and any questions!