So - What Is It?

What is it? Well, it is what it is, and what it is is ten, count 'em, ten boxes of photos, slides, negatives, contact sheets, and miscellaneous materials encompassing the photographic history of the Business School, from the 1930s to the turn of the 21st century. Yesterday was my first full day of examining the materials and doing an initial sort, and I got through seven of the ten boxes, and along the way, I went from the sublime to the ridiculous, finding photos of the Honorable Barbara Jordan cheek by jowl with photos of Ken Lay, former CEO of the former Enron! I've begun by dividing the materials up by medium and once that first sort is done, I'll start examining the quantities of the different materials (to address potential storage solutions) and the possible metadata/search tags, as well as making note of images that get the Gold Star for potential inclusion in the Texas Digital Library's McCombs Community.

I also felt it was important to consider the specific needs of the end users, the members of the McCombs Department of Communications, Marketing and Public Affairs. With this in mind, I composed a brief series of questions via Survey Monkey and sent it to the ten members of the Communications team. I will use their responses to guide my decisions regarding the formats preferred, the materials to be cataloged, and materials to be discarded. I've created a spreadsheet to start logging the materials, but I will likely make adjustments to it after I assimilate these responses. Hmm. Does that make me The Borg?

Stay tuned for next week's installment. Same Bat Time. Same Bat Channel.

And Thus It Begins...

In just a few weeks, I will begin my Professional Experience Project as part of the degree requirements for my MSIS (Master's of Science in Information Studies) at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information (The iSchool). I've been working on my degree since Spring 2007 and will complete my program of studies in Spring 2011, all the while holding down a 40+ hour a week job. As much as I have enjoyed the program, the process, and the people, I'd be lying if I said I can't wait for it all to be finished, so I can go on to just fretting about my personal life and my work life.

Well, enough of my whining - on to the real meat of this blog.

First, for those of you unfamiliar with the program, the Professional Experience Project (aka Capstone) is a professional project designed to integrate our educational experience with a real life work experience in order to prepare us for The Big, Bad World of Information Professionals. This is usually done in a student's final semester, but as I'm a part time student and this almost perfect opportunity presented itself, I'll be undertaking this during the upcoming summer semester instead of Spring 2011 (and the fact that there is often a dearth of good summer classes - at least ones I have not yet taken - is another excellent reason for taking this slightly out of sync).

The project I will be undertaking is the McCombs School of Business Photo Digitization and Archival Project, working with Mary Cone in the McCombs Department of Communications, Marketing & Public Affairs and Amy Rushing in the UT Libraries, with Professor Megan Winget acting as my faculty supervisor. My goals for this project are to:

• Create an improved storage solution for photographic materials which the Department of Communications wishes to keep;


• Create a searchable spreadsheet of materials in the collection with keywords for subject and physical location;

• Identify images from the collection to digitize;

• Digitize selected images from the collection of photos, slides, and negatives from the McCombs Department of Communications; and


• Ingest digitized images and metadata into the University of Texas Digital Repository

I'll be working on this project from May 26, 2010 through August 11, 2010 and will participate in a poster presentation session (along with other students completing their capstone projects) at the end of the summer semester. This blog was requested by Professor Winget as an efficient way to keep a log of my progress, so for those of you reading this who are not part of the iSchool, I thank you for your interest and even your input.