My Day of Digital Scholarship, 4/8/2013

7:45am — My Day of Digital Scholarship starts with a sick child at home. I’ve already made her lunch, as I do every day. But she has a cold and a fever and can’t make it to class. She’s nearly 13 so she can stay at home by herself while my husband and I go to work. We’ll both come home for lunch to check on her. (We’re very fortunate to live in NYU faculty housing only a 5-minute walk from our jobs).

8:11am — breakfast (Dannon coffee yogurt) and reading: 1) email, 2) twitter, 3) New York Times (always in that order). Squeeze in a few rounds of Letterpress.

9:00am — Read Aaron Reed’s 4/7/2013 blog post “12 from ’12” in which he reviews 10 new Interactive Fiction (IF) games. I do like puzzle games, but have always found IF frustrating because I can never figure out exactly what word the system wants in order to move ahead with the game. I’m relieved to see Aaron acknowledge the “guess-the-verb” problem. Not having played IF much I didn’t know this was an acknowledged issue and just assumed I was lousy at IF. I’ll check out the games he lists this evening.

10:20am — arrived 10:00 and checked on the Digital Studio to make sure everything’s OK there. (It’s right across from my office. Here’s a picture of it from inside my office.) Now, to check email again and onto some project work. photo

10:30am — first project: A VIP faculty has a collection that our nascent Digital Scholarship Services is helping to digitize and catalog. We are digitizing for access, not preservation. We have some money for this project so we’ve hired a full-time person with appropriate language and subject matter skills to do the description. We now have some AV materials (audio, video, film) we need to digitize. So today I will talk to our preservation department as well as ARTstor (where the collection will ultimately reside) to determine what the access file formats should be and whether or not we should also encode to a higher standard as insurance against future format migration.

11:30am — I spend a lot of time every day walking around: from meeting to meeting, up and down stairs, into and out of the Digital Studio, to/from Bobst Library, Astor Place, 20 Cooper Square. Over the past hour I did the following:

  • investigated possible file formate for access-only faculty AV collection going into ARTstor
  • walk down (and back up) 3 flights to talk to a colleague about AV file formats
  • answered an email from a faculty needing help with a website
  • helped to organize a workshop on Omeka, Neatline, + geoserver.
  • checked in on an outstanding issue about one of the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library videos.
  • wrote to a colleague agreeing to give her students a tour of the Digital Studio in June.

12:05pm — I just emailed a library school student at the University of North Texas with answers to questions about our Afghanistan Digital Library project. In particular she wanted to know about the phase of the project in 2007 when we sent a team of three to Kabul to provide conservation and flatbed digitization training to the staff of the Afghanistan National Archives and to scan materials.

1:00pm — NYU’s Digital Library Technology Services management group meeting. This groups meets weekly and discusses new and ongoing projects, solves problems, and makes decisions. We do what you might call project portfolio management.

2:15pm — catching up on email and twitter. Below, a photo of my office. The framed print over my desk on the right is an engraved reproduction of a 1610? engraving of the Leiden University library (here is a black & white reproduction).
JVOffice

2:30pm — talked to David Millman, Director of NYU’s Digital Library Technology Services (and one of my two bosses), about projects, project management, and our plans for creating a new unit tentatively called Digital Scholarship Services. Monica McCormick and I have been thinking, speaking, and publishing on this topic for the past two years. We’re now ready to figure out how to turn our theory into practice at NYU Libraries.

3:00-4:00pm — public service in the Digital Studio (subbing in for another staff member).   During my shift I:

  • worked with a colleague to figure out how the heck MS Word’s automated table of contents works (we couldn’t)
  • tried to make my Macbook Air stop blacking out at random moments for 5-8 seconds at a time
  • helped a student extract audio from a video file using iMovie
  • ran around looking for the right power cord, as one does
  • read that dopey op-ed piece by Scott Turow
  • helped a client transfer a finished video project onto her laptop. She’s been working on this project for the past week. It includes video, separate audio files, screen motion capture and live audio overdubs (which she also did in the Digital Studio’s live room). We helped her with post-production and file compression for streaming via NYU Stream (which is built on Kaltura).

4:30pm — back in my office. Time to catch up on twitter then start writing some user stories for an improved digital library video service: “As a <role>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>”

5:40pm — Time to head home. More emailing and reading later this evening. Before running out the door, I’ll order a few faculty-requested books for the French collection (I am also the subject specialist for French & Italian language & literature).

7:50pm — time to relax. Aside from fewer meetings, my day of digital scholarship was actually pretty typical and exhibited the usual amount and mix of content, context switching, running around looking for things, walking up and down the stairs, trying to fix things that aren’t working, strategic thinking, tactical thinking, public service, writing, reading, and chatting. All in all a good day.

The night before my “Day of Digital Scholarship, 2013”

It’s only 10:30 the night before the 2013 Day of DH, but I wanted to start by explaining a bit about my work. I’m an #alt-ac librarian whose work is focused mainly on digital initiatives. I have an M.Phil (i.e., I am ABD) in French Literature from New York University. (Why I left the French department before finishing my dissertation is another story for another day.)

In addition to my digital library project management work and running NYU’s Digital Studio, I’ve been working with my colleague and friend Monica McCormick to think about how we can better support digital scholarship and publishing at NYU. We’ve spoken about this topic (here and here) and just wrote an article, Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability. While digital humanities is a very important part of our current concerns, at NYU we’re casting a wider new in terms of creating partnerships and developing services. So I’m calling tomorrow my “Day of Digital Scholarship.”

My typical day: is filled with meetings: usually anywhere from 4-6. These are work meetings, by which I mean that stuff actually gets done in these meetings. There are steering committee meetings (public services, collections) leadership/management meetings (Digital Library Technology Services management, an ITS leadership team), staff meetings (Digital Studio, Digital Library Technology Services), working groups and committees, and faculty meetings (yes, NYU librarians have faculty status). In most of these meetings we discuss important projects, address service roadblocks, make decisions and solve problems. I also frequently meet with scholars to help them accomplish their work.

Surprisingly, tomorrow I have only one scheduled meeting (Digital Library Technology Services management group) so I will hopefully have plenty of time to accomplish some outstanding work I haven’t been able to get to over the past month.

Tomorrow, for my “Day of Digital Scholarship,” I will keep a running blog listing what I’m doing throughout the day to give readers an idea of the different kinds of work that I do.