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.
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).
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.