Best guide or video for manual entry in Preservica?

Hi all:

I’m out in the weeds, a bit lost while wading through all of the videos and PDFs about Preservica available in a variety of places. I’m hoping someone can point me to a PDF or video that would be most useful to me.

Essentially, I’m looking for a step-by-step guide that shows me how to manually add a document to Preservica—without having an XML upload to pair with it.

The short story is: For the past five months, I’ve been a temp handling a lot of the prep and ingest for content (mostly PDFs and images) for an academic digital repository. However, the process I’ve been using relies upon Python (and maybe other language?) scripts that both (a) generate a giant XML document of all the content I’ve entered into an Excel spreadsheet and (b) split that content into individual XML files that I then convert into .metadata files and upload into Preservica, with their companion PDFs or JPGs. These scripts allowed us to ingest large quantities of content with all its metadata already filled out, leaving me just a few changes to make before publish. We’re using MODS, if that is relevant.

Unfortunately, the person who did all the scripting and coding has just left, and none of the rest of us have experience with that. That means for now, if I want to input any new content, I’m stuck. I assume most folks using Preservica actually don’t have someone who writes fancy, complex computer scripts for them, and you are just uploading the content and manually entering the metadata. Is that the case? I am looking for some instruction on how to do that, because at this time, sans the only employee who really knows how to handle all those computer scripts, I am at a stand-still if I don’t come up with an easier, more manual process for entering content. If I have to ingest each PDF and hand-fill-out the metadata, then that’s what I’ll do. In this sea of documentation PDFs and videos and webinars, please point me to where I can learn how to do that. I’ve never before uploaded a piece of content without a companion .metadata file.

I believe I’m using the cloud version of Preservica, if that matters. If you need additional version information, please let me know where I can find it and I’ll update this post.

Thank you very much.

Gratefully,

Kate