Saturday, October 27, 2007

Week 9: Re-Assessing Expectations

I have a lot of catching up to do. Due to an illness last week, I did not get in a full 20 hours again. I plan to work a few days over Thanksgiving break to make up this time, since we have the entire week off from school.

The good news is that I now have 24 pamphlets digitized. The bad news is that my target number of 50 may be unattainable at this point. Most of the interesting pamphlets are fairly long, in the 20-30 page range, and reformatting them is a fairly slow process. I am trying to find very short pamphlets to increase the total number, but they seem to be in the minority for the time period I am dealing with. I spoke with Nicki about this, and she is fine with scaling back the original goal of 50 and just getting done whatever I can. I would like to include as many as possible though, and am hoping to end up with at least 30-35.

I guess this is what Kelly Smith meant when she talked about project objectives being an "iterative process" during her presentation in seminar the other week. With this project being very time-limited, it is difficult to gauge all the variables that will effect the final outcome (such as missing work). I certainly have a more realistic idea now of what I can reasonably expect to accomplish by the end of the semester, but even that may be revised a month (or a week) from now.

So, now that I have a reasonable number of documents digitized, it is time to re-focus on other tasks. Specifically, I will be meeting with Nicki and the DLS web designer to discuss web interface at the end of the week. I need to put my ideas down on paper and come up with a prototype to show them. Also, this week I plan to return to the research I had been working on previously, which has been on the back burner for a while now, so I can start writing a first draft of the text I want to include with the collection. I contacted a professor at the U of I who has a research interest in food, in case there is a possibility for collaboration there. No word yet, but if that doesn't pan out at least it will help get the word out about the collection to potential users.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Week 7: Slow Week

Unfortunately, I didn't get a lot of work done on my project this week, with the ILA convention preventing me from going to the library for a couple of days. Those days I did work didn't involve anything new to report, since I was doing exactly the same thing I have in previous weeks. I've now uploaded/cataloged a total of 10 pamphlets, with one more nearly ready. Nicki and I agreed that I would continue concentrating on production through the end of this month, and then shift my focus to planning the website. I will be scheduling a preliminary meeting with the web designer in a week or two to discuss my ideas.

In the absence of substantive project-related news, I will be writing about my impressions of the ILA conference as they relate to digital librarianship. Overall, the experience gave me a renewned feeling of confidence that the skills I am gaining through the IMLS fellowship will serve me well when I enter the field. The future of libraries in the Internet age was a big theme of the sessions I attended, and I was left with the feeling that the digital librarian will play a crucial role in shaping this new paradigm.

This idea was reflected in Jim Elmborg's talk about the future of library education, in which he emphasized the profound changes caused by technology and the growing importance of online access. He made a point of mentioning the exciting possibilities created by the marriage between special collections and digital libraries, which made me feel particularly glad that I am gaining experience in this area through my current project.

Another session I attended was entitled "A Crop of Careers in Libraries," in which representatives of various ILA subdivisions were on hand to answer questions about careers in their field of interest. I spoke with representatives of ACRL, SLA, and Information Technology, all of whom expressed optimism about the growing number of career opportunities in digital libraries.

I also heard Stephen Abram of the SirsiDynix Institute give a speech entitled "Baby Busters, Gen X, and Born Digital Babies". Abrams profiled the next generation of library users, who have grown up in a world of "media saturation" and experience the Web as a central component of their lives. His underlying point was that libraries need to embrace the Internet as a means to connect with this group, and obviously, digital libraries are quite applicable to this goal.

Next week, I will make up some of the hours I lost this week and try to get as much production work done as possible. This will probably require me to start choosing shorter pamphlets for digitization, so I can meet my goal of 50 pamphlets by the end of the semester.

Monday, October 8, 2007

Week 6: Cataloging Questions

This week was primarily a continuation of last week's work. I reformatted and uploaded four more pamphlets to the CONTENTdm server, for a current total of eight. I'm getting the hang of the process and am working faster, but it's still fairly slow going. In terms of planning, I'm thinking I'll spend the next couple of weeks plowing through as many pamphlets as possible. Since this seems to be the most unpredictable part of the project timing-wise, it would be a bad idea to leave it for the end of the semester. After getting a substantial number of objects digitized, I'll take a step back and start focusing again on the other tasks at hand, such as designing the website and writing the accompanying contextual information.

I also took a break from digitizing to research metadata. Metadata librarian Jen Wolfe provided a link to a helpful article, "Introduction to Metadata", which I've started reading and will continue looking at this week. So far I've read the first section, which talks about the different definitions and types of metadata, its attributes and characteristics, and the life cycle of digital objects.

I've also been learning a lot simply by going through the process of cataloging the pamphlets. Since I haven't taken a cataloging class yet, I feel unsure as to whether I'm doing a good job. I started to get confused about how much detail I should be going into when adding subject headings. For example, for a pamphlet with recipes for canned salmon, do I simply leave it under the broad term of "cookery", or do I also include terms such as "salmon", "fish", "seafood," etc.? How do I choose which ones to use? I talked with Jen about it, and she basically said there is no clear-cut answer, as cataloging is more of an art than a science. The conclusion we reached is that since the collection uses OCR (optical character recognition, which allows the user to search the text for specific words), it may not be necessary to give them more than broad subject headings. But I'm sure I will continue to edit and refine the metadata as I progress.