As the rest of my group has mentioned, this project is off to a slow start. With only one meeting so far, and without access to the collection, there’s only so much we can do. And right now, that leaves me a little bit lost.

The long waits in between meetings, for reasons noted by my other group members Suzanne and Lauren, add difficulty to how we decide to approach the project. We still do not have access to the collection or the Omeka site. It seems we will have to wait until our next meeting time (March 8^th) before we get more information and access for the project. I noticed there is a lot of missing and inconsistent metadata on the Airtable spreadsheet. I agree with Lauren that filling this in is a good starting point, but hopefully our next meeting is productive enough to where we can start tackling larger issues.

On the bright side, there is a chance we may be able to attend an oral history interviewing session for the LCHP in April. As the working group discussed coordinating the interviews, one of the librarians mentioned that if her team led the interviews, her colleagues would have to be prepped on talking to the community members. I was surprised initially to hear this, but as I thought about it, it made sense. Aside from our learning on how to effectively conduct an interview, there must also be readings on how to talk to different groups of people and avoid coming across as rude or offensive during interviews. Hopefully we can attend the interview session as it seems like it would be a good learning experience on oral history.

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.

After our recent follow-up meeting with CreativeWorks (CW) team at Joe’s Movement Emporium (JME), I think our team has a better appreciation for the current status of their files and organizational systems and we are starting to identify some of the needs we may be able to help them address. They would probably benefit from standardized file naming and hierarchy rules as well as working from a single server with regular backups. Their hardware and software setups are sufficient for student needs in the moment, but lack software updates, security features, and regular IT maintenance/support. And as my teammates have mentioned, each project, student, and staff member seem to implement their own systems, with varying degrees of clarity and success. And so, working with their teams to flush out the details of these systems, in addition to preparing their students and staff to move forward with them, is certainly easier said than done.

Broadly speaking, our conversations serve to both document these challenges and to allow the staff to interact and discuss them in a different setting. While Andy and Zach were detailing their findings from the computers, I found myself returning to the Weiss and Holtzenblatt techniques to further interview staff. Sierra reviewed the challenges of running the Digital Media Lab, including inventorying equipment, signing in and signing out resources, and providing appropriate guidance and training without creating barriers between students and their projects. Asking for more details about Patrick’s comments regarding a former staff member helped identify that some previous work had been done to retrieve student files before a contract with provider of computer gear ended, the details of which we should try to leverage. Finally, we also learned that there is a “Joe’s Metadata Template” actively used in AdobeBridge.

As the requirements grow more complicated, I think it will help us to keep in mind that it is a service to document these discussions, even if they have to do with “pain points” that our project and future projects may not be able to fix. To my mind, as we recommend improved intake and filing processes to track their assets, these may lend themselves naturally to helping CW make process improvements in other areas. Furthermore, since the files themselves go through an identifiable and relatively predictable life cycle, we can point out specific resulting deliverables (final projects, resumes, reports, etc.) that may help motivate both students and staff to participate in some new organizational processes.

The main lesson I took away from our group’s first meeting with MITH and our LCHP clients a week ago was, as Suzanne noted, the challenge of finding resources (both time and money) for small community archives like LCHP. Our meeting was very detailed and helpful, but much of it was spent trying to coordinate future times that worked for everyone for further meetings and grant application deadlines. A couple of technology issues also sometimes made it difficult for us all to hear one another over the conference call (we and the MITH folks were all together in person, but our LCHP clients joined the meeting via conference call and screen sharing). The fact that so many stakeholders from different organizations, including the former mayor of College Park, are willing to take time out of their busy schedules to help with this project is impressive. This project has been going on for years, through different UMD classes and groups of volunteers, and there are so many details and moving parts that it can be hard for us to catch up! But we did get some ideas for possible approaches from LCHP’s summary of their survey of informal “focus groups” of Lakeland-area residents, both young and older, who are the prime audience for the LCHP digital archives. According to LCHP, the young people said that in terms of the design of the digital archive, they’d prefer mostly pictures or diagrams and oral histories on the main page to draw them in, and then some text but not too much. One request that was consistent across both groups was to organize the digital archive documents by geographic location and possibly also by family or community relationships.

So LCHP wants to work with us to build a prototype using these organizing principles, with a preference for photos and other items that are easily shareable over social media. Before putting additional materials onto the public website, they want to sort them into two separate groups: those that already have geographic locations associated with them, and those that don’t, so they know which they can put up and which they need more information for. Sorting materials by age and subject can also help them decide which community members they can go to for this information. Their ideal goal is to eventually have an interactive app that provides a walking tour of Lakeland with geolocated photos and documents associated with certain locations. Suzanne’s idea of using HistoryPin would be perfect for this, but we haven’t brought this up with the client because we don’t know how we would integrate it with their existing digital archive, and we feel we have to manage their expectations for the limited time we have. We will probably start with helping them organize their existing Dublin Core metadata and adding some more metadata to their Airtable spreadsheets, and then go from there. I think all of the capacity assessment tools that we read about for this week have some aspects that could be helpful for our project, especially the Digital Preservation Management Tutorial “Survey of Institutional Readiness,” because it states that it “is intended to help you take stock of the requisite components of a digital preservation program and to help you begin or proceed with your digital preservation planning” (page 1, emphasis mine), which seems realistic for the small organization with which we’re working.

Last week at this time, I was happy just to have secured an initial meeting with our client, the Lakeland Community Heritage Project. This week, as we try to jump into the work of the project, it is clear that we need so much more information than we were able to gain in a 90-minute meeting. We haven’t actually been able to get into the Omeka site through which the collection is accessed. We only just got read-only access to the Airtable that MITH has started. We still need to explore and discuss as a group the options for how to create an usable inventory.

During the meeting, I was impressed by the passion and dedication that the member of the working group brough to the project. They really believe in the importance of preserving community by creating and preserving community archives. Yet, this project is still an avocation for everyone involved. From the president of LCHP to the MITH team members to ourselves, everyone has a day job. LCHP, no matter how important in principle, gets lost in more urgent day to day demands. So scheduling meetings is like pulling teeth. Email and online chatting through Slack are better but still dependent on catching people at the right moment. I am noting this not (just) to vent, but to illuminate one of the key challenges of community archives. Largely supported by volunteer labor, the community archives often exist only through the gift of time and labor that can only be given intermittently and often inconsistently. And we should be grateful! Most of people involved in LCHP (and I imagine most other public-supported community archives) are already working day jobs and second shifts beyond what they give back to the community.  Since curation involves provision for the sustainability of repositories and records, we will need to account for this reality in whatever solution we propose. Quick comprehensibility and ease of use are crucial for effective use of volunteer/amateur labor.

I would like to piggy-back off of Andy’s post, since we were at the same meeting (where I mentioned that we were looking at the wild frontier). I made the remark due to what I was seeing, which surprised me more than it did he and Juli.

Based on our first meeting with the client, I was under the impression that they needed more help with metadata than file structure. We were told that files were organized by year, group, student, and sometimes even project, but that was simply not true, at least consistently and obviously.

There are many student folders and a couple folders that appear to be tied to a year or two. Four external hard drives exist, but one is currently not being recognized, and they are not copies of each other (some files are mutual, but others are not). There are also six desktop workstations that have their own hard drives and it is not clear if any of those files exist on the externals.

I do not like that the situation feels so chaotic, but I know that one reason I feel that way is because of my autism. I like to feel in control or that I am in a controlled environment because predictability reduces my anxiety (which is especially of a social nature). That is why I am such an organized person. I need all of the client’s files to be centralized for me to really be able to wrap my head around what to do next with all of them.

We must leave our client with some guiding documents as part of this project because it is painfully evident that students, staff, and instructors are not on the same page.

Oregon Trail emulator

Having just come from our second meeting with Joe’s staff I believe I can confidently say we have come face to face with Dallas’ “wild frontier.”

Our second meeting introduced us to some new figures at Joe’s that work with the files in a much more hands-on capacity than the administrators we spoke with two weeks ago. We had a brief discussion on their views regarding many of the same needs and organizational challenges, but the bulk of our time was spent delving into the loose network of external hard drives, and individual work stations where their files are stored. We spent more than an hour doing this, but it honestly felt like just a glimpse of the larger picture.

From what I saw there appeared to be three approaches to the organizational structure.

1. Working folders: These were wildly inconsistent in their filenames, file locations, and hierarchical folder structure. In a few cases there was evidence that instructors had grouped certain types of work into folders by student name, but this practice was sporadic at best. These working areas were scattered in many places, both on the individual workstation hard drives, and the external drives that we were told were for backup. We were told that any organization of files in these areas was influenced by a combination of the instructor and the student’s organizational habits.
2. Back up folders: These literally had names like “TTP 2015 PHOTO/VIDEO DUMP”. I got the impression that these were more or less one for one backups without any attempt to examine the contents.
3. Curated folders: These folders had consistent naming structure and were found in several different drives. The apparent purpose of them appears to be retrospectively gather high value content from the current semester’s classes in order to make them easier to find.

My first thoughts after this meeting is that policy is going to be a big part of the solution for them. They currently have no guidelines that they give instructors or staff. This simple measure would go a long way towards establishing consistent practices. To aid in that capacity they could probably take advantage of many OS level features that would help them tighten control over certain areas. For example, they could give students read/write permission to only a single folder with their name on it in order to ensure all of a student’s work was contained in a logical location. Even if the student’s own organizational habits were lax these habits would not contaminate any other areas.