Aaaaaand, I’m done.

Ok, not really. Our team still wants to present our work to Joe’s, and of course we also need to present to our classmates. But the documentation of processes, and detailed recommendations for staffing and infrastructure has all been made official. The final reflections I included in the paper probably sum up things best, so I have included them below:

I was really pleased to have been assigned this project. A lot of my background experience in the areas of multimedia and photography became useful at several points. But more than anything I was appreciative of the enthusiasm Joe’s staff exhibited for the work we were doing. Sierra was the most immediate example of this, but several other Joe’s staff seemed receptive and helpful as well. That fact makes me optimistic that many of the points and suggestions we make in this paper will eventually be implemented in some form.

If I had to point to a specific disappointment I would probably say that it would have been nice to have had enough time to help them push all the way to the digital museum implementation stage. That is something I haven’t done before and would have been a good learning experience for me.

With regards to the team aspect of the project I would say that this is one of the first times in the program that I’ve felt like a team was really needed for a project. Not necessarily for the division of tasks, but for the multiple points of view on some pretty complex problems. I greatly appreciated my teammates’ ideas, and I think Joe’s has a stronger set of solutions because of the multiple viewpoints.

This week I edited my section of the inventory to prepare it for our Master Inventory. This allowed me to become more familiar with AirTable and Open Refine. Although I did not take advantage of facets and filters in Open Refine, it was still easy for me to use. I was able to change my subject terms to our preferred Controlled Vocabulary by simply choosing a term and applying my change to all identical cells. Pretty quick and neat.

AirTable, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to editing data. The Multiple Select field type is nice for lists, but there is no way to see every keyword in the field. Integrating the controlled vocabulary would have been easier if I could just edit the keyword and have the change applied throughout the column.

I’m writing a collection overview for both our contributor guide and final report. The Master Inventory will be useful for this as it’ll give me a clearer view of the collection.

I have spent this week catching up on the group paper and starting the outlines for my sections. I will be working on the Overview, the Inventory Analysis, and the Policy Recommendations for CreativeWorks. The Overview will include the obvious background information, along with a description of our initial findings and proposal. I think it’s particularly interesting to note that our initial impression was regarding the need for a digital museum/gallery experience for all of the great content, but ultimately we’ve ended up identifying ways to organize that content in hopes that future uses can be implemented later. This definitely isn’t a fault with the collaboration, but rather an example of how projects can shift quickly and it’s beneficial to remain flexible and communicative to achieve the best results.

The Inventory Analysis section will likely include some details from my previous post. I am also hoping to include the steps to repeat both the inventory export and the inventory analysis. However, some of the data is still a bit unclear (e.g., should we count the “Folders” file type?). Also, the analysis process has been mostly manual, still, so I need to confirm a good, repeatable method. There are several different ways to interpret the results but ultimately, this information makes clear that the CW team is likely continue to produce more and more content with each passing semester and helps make the case for a more formal storage and backup solution.

Finally, the Policy Recommendations will include details for CW staff, teachers, and students, with the approach that things like file naming, folder organization, and backup processes are everyone’s job and part of professional behavior. Pulling all of this together in a way that is approachable for each of these audiences will be the challenge here. Having outlined these sections, I feel ready to prepare my initial drafts for the team to review.

This week, we are working on completing a deliverable inventory to MITH, as well as getting into the contributor guide and the final report. In the process of polishing the inventory, I’ve monkeyed around in OpenRefine, which is indeed a usefull tool for crafting and editing a controlled vocabulary quickly and applying it to existing documents. The facets provide an easy-to-parse list, while existing side by side with the main sheet. It is an interesting contrast to Airtable. Airtable has invested much more in its GUI and so looks slick. But Airtable expects users to follow certain pathways, and does not easily allow for deviate without considerable backtracking. OpenRefine is so much more flexible and in some ways, intuitive. It lets you process the data simply to extract what you want. Still, despite it’s limitations in data manipulation Airtable presents a variety of visualizations that are useful for presentation and searching the finished product. The subject tags in particular shold be powerful search tools, and possibly useful in nudging future contributors toward conformity with the existing collection. By using both tools, I’m satisfied that the files I’ve processed are pretty close to (or at) their final form to turn over to MITH and LCHP.

Jenny and I are also preparing to talk to Prof. Sies tomorrow morning. I’d like to talk about how the Omeka site was set up, the function of the Collections that seem to have fallen into disuse, and the instructions received by the students about how to ingest their records into the collection. The Folklife Guide and the eBlackCU manual emphasize the importance of clearly articulating the goals of the project, and of understanding the community that your collection represents. From working with the Omeka collection, it is clear that Prof. Sies’s class has played a foundational role in the creation of the records. It may not do so in the future, but the shape of the repository has been set by these outsiders to the community.

The bulk of my work this week was on the Preservation Plan and trying to pull together all the strings to create the final document. I focused on ideas addressing Joe’s initial ask of creating a digital museum. We included various level of options with pros and cons so Joe’s can walk through these and figure out what fits best, for now and for later. Ideas are installing a slideshow module to their Drupal website; making a small investment in an Omeka-hosted site; downloading the free Omeka software to host on the Joe’s site; and utilizing social media tools.

It seems like we’re constantly addressing the issue of server space, both now and in the future. Social media provides the most immediate and accessible options for promoting student work to the public without having to address server or web host space immediately.  Plus, social media is already being utilized so seems like a good place to promote work to their audience who is already online.

Additionally, social media provides low threshold-to-entry and an expansion of storage space to upload their featured student work. By beginning to make a focused effort to curate slideshows, this would give Joe’s a better idea of they want slideshows/”museum displays” to consist of, what tools they might want to invest in long term, and help to prioritize their needs.

In the long-run, should Joe’s invest in a museum website or other option, the social media slideshows can be used to entice audience and draw them back to the respective website to see and learn more. Overall, social media could end up fulfilling their needs, or be a stepping stone to something bigger.

This week I’ve been looking back at previous assignments, blog posts, and Google Doc notes to sum up the evolution of our project for the project report. My part of the contributor guide, how to process oral histories and other incoming files, is somewhat contingent on what Dr. Sies’ classes’ processes have been in the past, about which we will find out more through Suzanne and Jenny’s meeting with her on Thursday morning. In the meantime I’ve been continuing to gather best practices from the list of collection resource guides Jesse provided to us. I also cleaned up our Airtable People controlled vocabulary, which entailed separating records with multiple people into separate person entries, alphabetizing them, and deleting duplicates. We decided to move any specific people from the Subjects controlled vocabulary to the People, leaving only family names in the Subjects. We ended up with 120 Subject entries, 257 Places/Institutions, and 613 People for 746 items!

I spent a fair chunk of time this week considering what kind of file types Creative Works currently produces, and what they should consider using for various purposes. Most of that time I spent examining the many options for video. None of which are terribly attractive for long term archiving. I was quickly reminded how messy and chaotic the evolution of digital video has been, and how even the most popular and widely used formats in use today will be considered quaint in less than 5 years.

I poured through lengthy comparisons of the archival merits of exotic formats, and checked various institutions for their minimum standards for video submissions. Ultimately I ended up believing that NARA’s requirements were the most down-to-earth and realistic for Joe’s, given that their editors are all beginner level yet their reuse patterns most resemble a production house, not a cultural heritage institution. NARA’s guidelines made provisions for such business needs.

In fact, the business needs and reuse patterns of Joe’s had me making recommendations for both video and still images that I’m slightly scared would be career limiting without explanation. In short, I believe that cultural heritage institutions have the luxury of not considering the expediency of workflow. They can save in whatever format preserves maximum data without fear of how that format affects their ability to use it. In most other businesses access is of far greater value, and they are willing to make compromises to achieve it. Having lived in that world for a long time now, and having personally felt the effects of inaccessible assets, I find that I’d rather guide the decision makers in that system to make informed decisions, but not at the expense of their ability to work. Sometimes that means allowing them to save in a lossy format. The horror!

If I am being honest, I have not done much in regards to the project this week, but I do plan to look at the final report later today that I know other group members have been devoting time to. Let me explain why.

I have become increasingly involved with the University of Maryland Autism Research Consortium (UMARC) this semester and a couple of months ago co-director Kathy Dow-Burger invited me to lead a meeting of their college transition program called Social Interaction Group Network for UMD students with Autism (SIGNA). They are in the middle of a unit on self-advocacy and disclosure and it is important for autistics to have mentors and role models, so it makes sense for them to be introduced to a self-advocate, and it is a way for me to get practice doing this sort of activity. I am excited for the opportunity, but preparing for it has taken up a lot of my time since my last blog post. I am okay with that, though, because a person has to be able to rank tasks by priority level and this one is a high priority for me for multiple reasons.

I gave a presentation to SIGNA staff yesterday and tomorrow I will be doing so to SIGNA members. After that, my life will calm down some, but for the iSchool Symposium on Tuesday, May 1st, I have organized and will be sitting on a panel that is designed to serve as an introduction to neurodiversity. The difference with that is that I will not be alone and it is only 40 minutes instead of 1.5 hours. I hope to see some of my classmates and professors there at 4:15 in the Nanticoke Room in Stamp.