Directors of projects or resources who wish to have their projects considered for inclusion are provided with the set of instructions below. If you have any questions about this process, please contact MESA staff directly at mesa.medieval@gmail.com.
Submitting a project to MESA has both technical and non-technical elements that operate in tandem. Because it can sometimes be difficult to determine what needs to go before what in submitting a project, we have provided this workflow to make things easier for project directors and other principals to submit their work to MESA:
- Because MESA operates off of indexed information, any project interested in submitting their work for inclusion in MESA should be aware of the Resource Description Framework schema that MESA uses to index its information. A link to that information can be seen here: http://wiki.collex.org/index.php/Submitting_RDF. The project principals should decide if that RDF can be generated in-house or if MESA will need to be involved in the process. The RDF for the individual project entries do not need to be generated at this point, but there should be a plan on the part of the project principals as to how they will generate this RDF in a way that is compliant with MESA’s guidelines.
- Once the RDF is understood and a plan as to how to generate that RDF is ready, the MESA Metadata Submission Form should be filled out with the necessary information regarding the project and sent to the MESA directors. The directors will look at the submission, note if there is any missing information that they need from the project principals, and then pass it along to the MESA Editorial Board.
- The Editorial Board will look at the project. If there are no objections regarding the project made by the Editorial Board, an email with a link to the project or main page of the collection will be sent to the MESA listserv (mesa@lists.ncsu.edu) for evaluation by the MESA community. If they are not already members of this list, project principals can subscribe to the list here: http://lists.ncsu.edu/cgi-bin/mj_wwwusr.
- For one month after submission to the listerv, the MESA community will look at and comment on the proposed project in an open and transparent manner. These comments will be readily available to see by both MESA staff and the project principals. During this month, the project staff will work with MESA to begin the process of RDF generation for the individual project entries. This is done to speed up the process of indexing the project completely and to help work out any possible issues as early in the RDF generation process as possible.
- If there has been no significant objection to the project, the review thread is considered closed after a one month period of evaluation and the project will be slated to be indexed as soon as possible. The staff of both the project and MESA work to complete the RDF generation for the individual project entries.
- Once the RDF generation is complete, the MESA staff will perform a preliminary index of the project. The project staff and principals will check the indexed material to make sure it matches their intent. If it does, a final index to the production server will be performed, and the project will become part of the federation of projects under the MESA umbrella.