BardMetrics procedures and best practices

Though BardMetrics is a mostly crowd-sourced initiative, we hope to standardize data as much as we can in order to make it easy to find and access within the BardMetrics system. To assist in this, here are several guidelines to follow when preparing data for inclusion in BardMetrics.

File naming conventions

All files should be stored in a unique Google Drive folder, labeled with the name of the donating institution.

Files should be named according to the following naming convention:

  • An abbreviated version of the institution’s name (“SQ” for Shakespeare Quarterly for instance), followed by…
  • A brief description of what the data is (“usage data”), followed by…
  • The dates which the data encompasses in alphanumerical form (“June 2006-January 2013”).
    • This example file name would be: “SQUsageDataJune2006-January2013”.

Abbreviations and data labeling

When submitting your files, please extend abbreviations to full-word labels so that we can better standardize data in the repository. If you choose not to extend abbreviations, please provide a legend for your utilized abbreviations.

Here are a few exceptions to that request:

The titles of Shakespeare’s plays may be abbreviated in accordance with the [web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Abbrev_Shakespeare_Titles.pdf MLA Handbook’s Standard Abbreviations of Shakespearean Titles].
For further style tips, please reference the Folgerpedia Style Guide.

Creating a finding aid

  1. List title of document in bold. Right now, titles are organized in alphabetical order. Apply “heading 1” style to document title.
  2. List the following block of access information:
Provided by: (name of organization/journal who provided discussed information)
Publication Type: (kind of publication we are dealing with and frequency; i.e. “Quarterly Journal”, “Mass Market Paperback”, “Digital Database”, etc.)
Date provided: Date which the information was given to the project; if updated list that. DO NOT delete past dates in this field.
Copyright or Usage Restrictions:
Cite Item As:
  1. Insert Empty return carriage and provide a brief explanation of what the data includes and data type. i.e. : “An excel worksheet which contains a collections of graphs related to the usage of Open Source Shakespeare.”
  2. Create an itemized list of every sub-document or pertinent portion of the piece in question. If it’s an excel workbook, list the sheets by title in bulleted form. Title should go in quotation marks followed by a dash then a one-word description of data layout (“Table”, “Chart”, etc.) Put a semi-colon after the one-word description, then any notes you may have about the information. Write “Fields” followed by a colon and a list of the fields, verbatim, from the document.