Ian's Digital Weblog

We seem to be nearing the end now with little over a month left to go on the DI and Glenister project. Chris and I met with Nicki Saylor and Mark Anderson this week to go over some specifics about how best to begin wrapping up the projects with the long-term future of the projects in mind. Nicki proposed focusing on the following goals:
1)Create an interface for both collections--This should be fairly straightforward as Nicki wants a largely uniform layout for each of the digital library collections. So it's mostly a matter of selecting images and subjects for canned searching (although there's not a lot of variety of searches that could be constructed for the Daily Iowan).
2)Ramp up the workflow--Chris and I are to look at ways to possibly expedite the process of batch cropping and converting the images (from Tiff to jpegs). A large part of our time this semester has been devoted to (sometimes mindless) labor as opposed to intellectual work. Part of what we discussed in seminar was trying to find a balance between sticking to a familiar process of work or risking trying something new that may in end save you time in the long run, or perhaps not. The nice part about being a digital fellow, is that our schedules are flexible enough that we don't have to become overly preoccupied with deadlines and even when mistakes are made, they become valuable learning experiences. This I feel must be part of the "real world" work experience because while achieving short term immediate goals are important (justifying budgets commensurate with productivity) experimentation are the keys to long term progress (in other words allowing time to play!). Chris and I will look into possibly finding software or some kind of batch command for photoshop. Nicki stressed finding a workable solution, one that may be imperfect but still help ameliorate some of the labor intensive work that has been so far involved.
3)Nicki is going to draft a memorandum of understanding for the Glenister project. Chris and I will edit it to the best of our knowledge and then it will be passed on to Tiffany Adrain.

On a non-digital project related note, I attended the Competitive Intelligence conference held on Friday. While I'm not sure I would like to go into the business information field, the conference did give me a sense of how important research skills are to competitive companies. One of the most interesting pieces of advice that was given at the conference was for librarians or library students to join professional organizations that don't have "our" skills. My previous belief was that the general public, large companies included, lack an understanding of the importance of the work of librarians, but perhaps this is not as pervasive as I once thought.