This week Zach and I went in to Joe’s to confer with Sierra and finalize the keyword taxonomy our team has been developing for them. We then imported it into Bridge on each of their workstations, so that they are all working with an identical set of keywords. Our hope is that this will function as a bit of a controlled vocabulary for recurring categories of metadata. Of course keywords are a rather fluid area of metadata and do not retain any hierarchical structure, but if this helps them maintain consistency then Creative Works will be a step ahead when they finally get to the stage of implementing the “digital museum” that is their ultimate goal.

We then addressed the topic of folder structure of in-progress work files. This discussion – and its related tangents – was quite fruitful. We were able to dive deeper on many points that our group previously had questions about, including their current hardware environment, the challenges it presented, how it effected workflow and file organization, and what an ideal hardware environment would look like for them. We also briefly touched on the concept of establishing a schedule of archiving tasks that maps to the timeline of each semester. For example, this schedule could:

• Carve out time the week prior to the start of classes for preparing workstations with a fresh template of benchmark folders for students to populate.
• Establish regular intervals during the semester for identifying portfolio quality work.
• Set aside time at the end of each semester for applying any final metadata and migrating student assets to a more permanent repository.

I feel like we’re getting close to the end of what we can physically do for Joe’s. We have provided them with the basic tools, but they are ultimately the ones that have to identify their content and make decisions about it. Most of the retroactive curation challenge for them now rests in knowing the “aboutness” of their files, and as a group we just don’t know what we’re looking at, so we’re ill-suited to apply metadata or make “keep vs toss” decisions…  well, at least decisions that aren’t obvious, like duplicates. I think the remainder of the value we provide to Joe’s will be in documenting many of the processes and standards we have established so that they have easy reference material for replicating these practices on their own for all future work. I hope to turn my attention to that this coming week.

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.

Like my fellow group members, my project work for both this week and next week consists of entering my quarter of the LCHP Omeka site’s metadata into our Airtable inventory spreadsheet. At this point I have inputted 70 records, with 115 more (some more of which will be done tonight and tomorrow) to be done by April 12.

So far I’ve been mostly focusing on inventorying what is already there, and only adding what I can add quickly, but I plan to go back and add more at the end. I ended up leaving the “Document Creation Location” column in my tab for now, because once I got to the Oral Histories it seemed useful to note where they were recorded.

For further along in the project plan, Jesse said that he has some examples of contributor guides he can show us, which should be very helpful.

Now back to metadata!

This week, team progress was made continuing to refine the organization of the external hard-drives, continuing to iterate on the folder structure, and (tomorrow) exporting an inventory of the compiled files. The process of gathering and evaluating all of the content has been time-consuming and I have concerns that we may get the CreativeWorks team to a point where they feel more organized now, for the snapshot of time where we applied our efforts, but still lack concrete steps to develop and maintain long-lasting improvements. In March, we started a document about best practices for digital organization to try to capture some best practices in a way that is easy to read and share, but it still feels like the organization would benefit from prioritizing the creation of official digital processes, policies, and procedures and from placing greater emphasis on the human and technical resources needed to support that effort. It is easy enough to pass along that kind of recommendation but more difficult to imagine that they have the organizational capacity and desire to consider them.

Similarly, last week, our team found ourselves discussing the value of the inventory we propose to generate now that (we think that) all of the digital content is consolidated and backed-up. The file names are rarely informative, the metadata is scarce and inconsistent, and duplicates are expected and sometimes unavoidable. On one hand, it seems impossible to recommend a long-term digital preservation plan without understanding all of the assets. On the other hand, however, the staff has neither the interest nor the time to clean up old data (outside of the identified high-value works). So once again, I return to the value their program could provide by teaching students how to label and identify their digital work according to a more rigorous standards from the get-go, as part of the generalized job training they provide. While the organization effort we’ve accomplished so far is notable and incredibly helpful for the staff, I hope that we are able to translate this into an organizational priority in terms of student skills.

Tomorrow, I plan to spend more time considering the implications of the Common Heritage grant for CreativeWorks. I appreciate the broad support the funding suggests regarding the importance of digitizing cultural heritage materials and the organization of outreach through community events around these materials. There is no doubt that JME and CreativeWorks participate in activities that fall under that umbrella. However, most of what CreativeWorks generates now is already digitized and presented at a public event for outreach that gain support and broaden their audience, so some of the grant focus feels redundant. While I think that our group can hopefully offer some valuable insight into how JME and CW might best leverage their assets and skills for additional funding, I am tempted to recommend they identify a technology infrastructure grant that could help meet their networking needs, a more pressing current issue.

As Maya, noted, right now the whole group is putting in time entering the metadata of Lakeland’s Omeka collection. The metadata coverage is erratic, to say the least, with very spotty coverage of traditional Dublin Core categories and inconsistent terminology. Perhaps the most difficult and frustrating part of data entry is keeping myself from “improving” the data too much. We have agreed as a group to add short descriptions, to correct obvious typos, and to note our additions and edits by using italics. Beyond these minor improvements, I sense that even within my own record keeping, there is some drift in the subject and place/institution categories, and I assume that everyone is creating slightly varied wordings for the same concepts or organizations. We tried to minimize differences by using tags  within Airtable, but as I create more and more tags, I wonder if I should have used some of these new ones in earlier records. The next time we meet, I’d like to talk about creating a controlled vocabulary for the Subject (Authority Records) and the Place/Institution (Authority Records). Part of putting together a puzzle is making sure you are working with the pieces from the right set.

Still, despite the tedium of data entry and my concerns about consistency, I feel like I am learning a lot about Lakeland and its history. Bit by bit, I am seeing the foundational importance of the railroad, the fraught relationship between the university and Lakelanders, the complex manifestations of racism, and the ravages of urban renewal. Certain families–the Brookses, the Grosses, the Braxtons–and certain individuals–the developer John Kleiner, the assessor John Shank, councilman Leonard Smith–resurface again and again. It makes me nostalgic for my old historian work in the archive, to be honest. I would love to see the stories that Mary Sies and her students, and Maxine Gross and her community weave together with the records.

This week I am continuing with inputting metadata about items in the Lakeland collection into our group’s AirTable spreadsheet. It’s a fairly mundane process, especially since there often is very little metadata actually present. Often an entry will have a title, a url, possibly a short description, a document type, and a file type, and nothing else.

I have entered 60 entries so far, and have another 125 to do by April 12. Obviously, I intend to accelerate the pace of entries this week and this weekend.

Overall, this is boring but necessary work.

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.

This week, I am continuing to input metadata on my group’s AirTable spreadsheet. I have detailed 80 records so far, with 105 more to go before April 12^th. Creating an inventory of the items on the LCHP Omeka website is the first step for our project plan. After this, we will create a contributor guide and potentially a printed user guide with the inventory as a base.

In order to finish my share of the metadata by next Thursday, I plan to input another 55 records by this Saturday and the final 50 next Tuesday. Last week we decided to remove a column in the spreadsheet that was not relevant for most items in the inventory (“Document Creation Location”), to italicize item descriptions we wrote ourselves (to differentiate them from original descriptions), and mark “None” when an item is not part of a collection (which is often).

Overall, this is a really boring part of the project. I can see the value in the work as the metadata on the Omeka website is so sparse and inconsistent. Still, the work is repetitive but thankfully does not take that long. I am looking forward to next Thursday so that we can work on other parts of the project.

I was at Joe’s today for four hours preparing the one working 4TB external hard drive (that we have centralized a copy of all student files on to) for Lauren to stop by tomorrow and run our inventory generating software on it.

While I was there, I spoke with Sierra (and eventually Patrick, who joined us) about an email that she sent me last Friday. In it, she told me that she is planning to request some new equipment before another class starts later this month, including one larger external to replace the broken 4TB one, and five smaller 2TB externals that match two that they already have. This would bring their total number of externals to nine.

I also learned more about another space (Harmony Hall) that they are going to start using later this month. It is a parks and rec department facility and they will be sharing it with them, including a lab with ten or so laptops. This setup does not sound appropriate for multimedia production and editing, or for CreativeWorks.

• Laptops instead of desktops.
• (Possibly) wireless network connection instead of wired.
• No ownership of hardware (workstations, modem/router, server?). This also raises questions about administrator/student accounts and privileges.
• No network connection to the main Mt. Rainer location.

The thought behind a request for multiple externals comes from this situation. Rather than save files on internal drives in machines that they do not own, students would instead use externals that CW does own. These drives could also travel between the two locations. [She also mentioned how some instructors desire/recommend externals to work off of because that frees up the machine for rendering. This sounds odd to both of us and I would like to know more.]

I explained to Sierra and Patrick and how they need a network-based solution to their problems instead of physical disk one, but then they told me all of this new information and now I do not know what to think. We floated the idea of still improving the server situation at the Mt. Rainer location; enlarging its storage capacity and using it to backup externals, and connecting it to any CW machines in the building so that it could be a repository for all CW content, both staff and student.

I am really bothered by what I learned about the Harmony Hall location today. It does not sound like someone thought about what would be best for CreativeWorks, or asked for Sierra’s input. I do not understand what the point of the location even is.

Our group has successfully migrated all of Joe’s reachable digital assets (one drive is currently down for the count…  Zach is contacting MITH about possible remedies) to the largest external drive they currently have, a 4TB Western Digital MyBook. Lauren plans to run our inventory software on it this Thursday before class to create an excel file detailing every file and folder that exists. Hopefully after that we can find some clever ways of re-sorting the many fields to start tapping some actionable metrics out of the inventory, such as how much disc space they fill up in a semester, and with what type of work predominantly. These are both pieces of information that will be vital to the recommendations we plan to leave with Joe’s regarding how they should plan and budget for the basic maintenance of their storage environment, as well as the file format choices they make to maximize longevity of their project files.

In truth, the file format of finished student work is actually much less challenging than Joe’s commitment to keeping all student project files for at least two years. Updates in software occur so rapidly now that old project files for After Effects, Premiere, Audition, iMovie, Final Cut, and others sometimes can’t be opened in the new version. Usually the new version allows a conversion to take place, but not all filters render the same way, and occasionally some are deleted. I am not aware of a solution to this issue. These are highly proprietary formats and I suspect some risk may simply be inherent in the promise to retain these project files.

This past week I took a first crack at establishing an underlying folder structure for Joe’s to use going forward. The Events documentation portions I’m pretty confident will suite their needs. I modeled them on the organizational system we use at MITRE for housing our event photography. The system has worked well for us in a multi-shooter environment. The keyword taxonomy we’ve worked up for use in Adobe Bridge roughly mirrors this system as well, though Joe’s is a bit simpler than the one we use at MITRE. The student work areas of the folder structure on the other hand bear a great deal more group discussion, as well as collaboration with Sierra, who after all, will be the one that either maintains the structure or abandons it.

Probably the biggest thing I’m struggling with at the moment is what to recommend to Joe’s for hardware changes. Our whole group agrees that working off of a centralized server would greatly simplify their workflow and preservation efforts. And I have no problem with offering that as one possible goal to work towards. However, that kind of server space and the high speed network that would necessarily accompany it in order to allow video editing will undoubtedly make that a long term goal at best. I would like to offer them a “minimum effort” option that is achievable in the short term and offers them at least some measure of increased security and/or performance. So far I’m undecided on what the easiest path forward would be.