Week 8

I had a conversation with fellow fellow Joe the other day about the progress of our projects and I think we're all starting to realize just how little we're going to finish this term. Relatively speaking. This of course was as I was coming into the semester with high expectations and almost zero understanding of how to begin a new project. 6,000 slides did seem like a large undertaking, but I figured maybe, if I worked assiduously enough, I could finish like half of the slides? As it stands, we have some 120 slides uploaded on the digital library site with another 100 ready to go. And we're more than half way through the semester. Unfortunately, it's not a matter of, well maybe we can just pick up the pace. It's been about two weeks since the Geoscience department last emailed me, and I felt like Chris and I had to do a bit of haggling to get our last batch. I don't mean to sound overly negative about this aspect of the project. I understand the Geoscience Repository employees are busy with a multitude of other things of more pressing concern. Moreover, Tiffany Adrain is dependent on Dr. Glenister freely giving of his own time to, somewhat, laboriously, go through and label the collection, slide by slide.

Although, we've reached the mid-1880s in the Daily Iowan collection, we haven't been regularly uploading the images because of a problem with Content DM. Mark promptly emailed OCLC, and we found out, today, that the problem had to do with spacing the cursor after the final line in our tab delimited text files. To which I say, why is Content DM so finicky? and I never ever would have thought that was the problem. Well, at least, a simple problem only demands a simple solution. Hopefully, we'll get at least another decade posted to the collection site in the next week or so.

I feel lucky that I've had so many helping hands in my own projects in the DLS department. Chris and I have encountered our share snafus, and Mark has repeatedly stressed that it is all a good learning experience. And that, I feel, is what I will probably take away from this semester. Yes, it would be nice to have some evidence for all the work we've put into metadata and such, but the more salient, albeit less explicit, goal is to establish a workflow and create documentation for our standards to keep our project running so that maybe a year or two down the line, someone else can finish the work we started.

Finally, in a non-digital, but library related note, I went to the ILA conference on Friday and found it, a bit to my surprise, to be pretty worthwhile. While, many of my fellow library students seem much more self-assured about the direction in which they're going (i.e. they want to work in academic libraries or with old manuscripts in special collections or in school libraries), I still feel like I've been mostly direction-less since beginning school. Part of me wonders if I entered library school as an alternative to doing something more challenging or perhaps less job-friendly. Did I want to be libarian because it was something that is comfortably familiar? While much of what was discussed at the conference, wasn't earth-shatteringly new, perhaps it was not precisely what was said, but how it was said (Personally, I felt quite inspired). Speaking in broad terms, Joseph Janes, a speaker from the University of Washington, was able to precisely articulate why the library profession is so worthy an endeavor. The idea that libraries extend beyond a building isn't new, but as Janes put it, libraries have always tried to get out of the building, and it is the digital world (as David Weinberger puts it, the conversion of atoms to bits) that allows the library to be somewhere and everywhere. But in doing so libraries shouldn't strive to be Google. Libraries can beat (maybe an imprecise term?) Google by not trying to be Google, but focusing on the niche areas where our quality will always trump the expedient, yet shallow search results of Google. The digitization of documents by the staff at DLS, and other similar departments at Iowa, are working towards ensuring libraries stay relevant in an ever more digital world.

Week 6

At Professor Srinivasan's behest, Chris and I looked at a number of other digital newspaper collections this week, for comparison's sake and hoping to glean some useful ideas for our own. One particularly impressive example is the Yale Daily News Digital Archive. One of the cool and useful features in this particular collection is the ability to highlight and select segmented text for close viewing. According to Mark Anderson, this feature is only available through OCLC (for a considerable fee) employing a mapping standard called METS/ALTO, which delineates each articles position on a specific page. More can be read about OCLC's proprietary control over this feature here.

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