Re: diglib: file naming conventions

[Jon R Jablonski <jonjab@uoregon.edu>]

Both links from Christine describe practices that I am (basically) trying
to adopt with WWDL aerial photos.  I am unsure if I want to take these
practices all the way to the individual photo level.  The biggest question
(for me)  seems to be:  if the file is ever taken out of its folder
context, will it be able to find its way back in?

Example:  if I have wwdl/aerial_photos/john_day_dam/1936_a.tif and I take
that image and put it on a workstation and do some work on it, how will I
make sure it goes back into john_day_dam and not the bonneville_dam
folder?  For the most part, this shouldn't happen because by the time we
settle on the directory path (ie:  we've been moving scans from 'work'
folders into storage folders) the image has sort of stabilized, eg: we've
performed tasks on them that won't ever have to be done again for this
project.  If we do open them back up, it seems like they'll wind up in new
folders.

Finally:  I have reports that some GIS applications don't play well with
dashes--they prefer under_scores.

-jon

Jon Jablonski                                                541-346-2871
jonjab@uoregon.edu

Reference Librarian
Science Library
__________________________________________

Dave & Nancy Petrone MAP/GIS Librarian
Knight Library Document Center

University of Oregon.


On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Carol Hixson wrote:

> We've been having some discussions recently in
> MDLS about appropriate file names and making some
> changes to some file names used for our digital collections.
> We often deal with files created by different units
> and the file names are sometimes problematic.
>
> The MSU Guidelines provide some guidance on
> FOLDER naming conventions for folders on the
> MSU. Those state:
>
>
> "The project manager creates the name for the folder
> following the guidelines that the name should:
>     * Reflect the content of the project.
>     * Be reasonably short (three to fifteen characters)
>     * Use lower case characters.
>     * Not contain blank spaces.
>     * Not contain non-alphanumeric characters (except hyphens). "
> I think it would be useful to have some file naming conventions but
> am not sure that they would be identical to the folder naming
> conventions. For instance, the first one isn't practical when dealing
> with large sets of digital images from the same photograph collection.
>
> Question for the group: do we want to revise the MSU guidelines to
> include some file naming recommendations or should MDLS just
> handle that internally?
>
> Carol
>