This database is part of the Catholic Almanacs project, and the Digital Scholarship Group at Boston College has been working on it for a year. The overall goal is to turn U.S. Catholic Almanacs from 1833 to 1895 into a searchable database. For a more detailed contextual introduction to how the metadata is recorded in almanacs and how students extract and transcribe metadata onto google spreadsheets, visit this site).
The physical almanacs
An example of how metadata is structured in almanacs
In general, the Catholic almanacs record information about different Catholic institutions like churches, cathedrals, schools, hospitals, etc. and Catholic people like pastors every single year. Besides the metadata, the almanacs also contain information about the relations between specific institutions and people. For example, in the picture shown above, the almanac records that in 1870, in the diocese of Dubuque, in Dubuque City, St. Raphael’s Cathedral had people like Rt. Rev. John Hennessy, D.D., Very Rev. Thomas O’Belly, Rev. R. Ryan, and others residing in it. Similarly, for some institutions, they can also be “attended by” larger institutions. This is how (meta)data originally looked like in the Catholic almanacs.