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.

I worked this week on our Preservation Plan, pulling from our group notes and emails to house pertinent information, brainstorming for possible digital museum tools, and trying to wrap up our work. Last week I reported some averages, but Andy had some good questions: Are we able to get exact numbers by year, and how accurate could these be given the wholes in their archives?

I revisited the inventory list and tallied some very rough year-by-year figures of number of files (Juli is working on a more precise tally). I created a graph to show visually what CreativeWorks is generating a year so we can look at the situation in another light.

Temporary graph of files in CreativeWorks archives.

Andy asked why 2017 is such an outlier. Which raises some other questions: Is 2018 going to be similar since this chart only includes 3 months of files? And if this is the case, then file creation has more than doubled over previous years, and so what does this mean storage and back up issues moving ahead? Or maybe the broken hard drive is housing sets of files that we don’t have access to? Whatever the answers are, I feel like the visuals make a stark statement of what is at stake without a back up and preservation plan in place.

I plan to also create a bar graph for the disk space being used once that information is available.

I am also revisiting the inventory list to make it as useful a document it can be while trying to balance the fact it’s likely most of the content won’t need to be recalled—various version of the same document exist and many of the files lack descriptive names. But at the very least, I think these can be grouped by year then by parent folder.

This week I shifted gears to begin outlining a preservation plan. I felt it was important to include an audit and risk assessment, as well as preservation guidelines, to give CreativeWorks a snapshot of where they stand with software, hardware, and files, hoping this will underscore the proposed suggestions we layout.

Juli’s hashing out some metric information, but on rough estimates, we totaled more than 42,000 files, meaning CreativeWorks generates 9,000 files a year! I am curious to see the hard figure on this but find this rough number pretty sobering. I hope this fuels the importance to follow the guidelines we suggest, but I also think it’s pretty impressive, and can be used for fundraising. Another angle of this is also knowing what their limitations are; or at least having at-hand that for every 1 student, they need X amount of space.

On an early site visit, I mentioned to my teammates that I felt like we jumped into the deep end of the pool. Now with just 3 solid weeks before our project report is due, we’re at a point where we need to focus on pulling ourselves out and leaving the tools and guidance for CreativeWorks to carry on. To finish out the preservation plan and best practices documents, our team needs to confer and agree what our suggestions are.

As I write, I am reminded that we did acknowledge file inventory was going to be a big chunk of our work. We can’t do everything, so we’ll need to make sure we’re handing over usable and handy materials so it doesn’t feel daunting.

While I think everyone at CreativeWorks/Joe’s understands the importance of what we’re doing, and the value of it, I’m not sure how to best imbue them with need to follow our proposed structure and preservation guidelines.

The current piece I’m working on is figuring out a user-friendly way to provide Creative Works with an inventory of ALL their hard drives. We have the inventory of six computers/hard drives, but I’ll be going in tomorrow (Thursday) to run an inventory of the hard drive that houses all their hard drives to get a near-complete picture.

I found an app, File List Export, which allows you to select a folder and export a CSV or Excel file in a matter of seconds that includes File Name, Date Modified, Date Created, Kind, Size, Path, Parent Folder, Location, Comments, Description, Tags, Version, Pages, Dimensions, Width, Height, and more. It’s a wealth of information, but just a matter of how to make this data the most useful.

I think at the current moment and the near-future, they may not use or reference this list. But once they get to a point of building an online museum or program retrospective, they will have something to reference and know where to look or pull from. In my mind, if they wanted images of at least 1600 pixels wide, they could sort and find these. Also, in regards to a preservation/security angle, they will know exactly what is where if they lose a hard drive.

Overall, I think our project is moving along well. There are a lot of files, a lot of people, and a lot of tech issues to consider. I think our work to create some order out of the file chaos will help to relieve “psychic energy” and allow staff to focus their efforts and energies on their students and outreach.

I appreciate reading blog notes by my group mates from the second meeting with Joe’s Movement Emporium. Unfortunately, car troubles prevented me from attending. At the time of writing this, my group hasn’t debriefed but it sounds like there is a lot more groundwork to lay, including simply sorting through what is actual there and where and how.

At this point, all I can relay is experience from my own work situation. My professional work project is ten years old, and as time has progressed, I have tried to be more dutiful about properly naming and filing files since I now most all the graphic design, imagery, and documentation. In year’s past, I’ve taken on other roles in the organization and was mystified about how the person before me organized the files and think about what would have been a more way to name them so that anyone that steps into the position can jump and navigate the files in more easily. Although only with three colleagues, trying to get them to follow a more systematic approach has been an ongoing project and “reminders” about how and why. I think people who are busy are just trying to get things done, but I try to express by not taking a few extra seconds to name and file assets, they are creating more work for them—and everyone else—in the future.

It will be great to brainstorm with my group and get ideas about other methods and, perhaps, just a simpler process so others don’t find it daunting, but useful.