- HPL Volunteer Work
- Overview of completed work available here
- My entries on the volunteer blog commenting on each week’s work
Mostly so far I have been writing short summaries of digitized KHOU news reel footage from the ’60s and ’70s; the footage I worked on is shown through the link, along with the digitized Orris Brown 1930s footage I did. I have also created metadata for digitized photographs using ContentDM.
- VSD Project Plan (pdf)
- Also available through SURFACE – iSchool Student Research & Writing Projects
This is the final product of a semester-long project for IST 613, Library Planning, Marketing, and Assessment. Philip Bolton, Jr. and I developed a project plan (including literature review, project plan, marketing plan, and assessment plan) to implement chat reference services and to triage email reference queries (Virtual Service Desk, or VSD) for the Health Sciences Library at SUNY Upstate Medical University.
As of August 2010, however, enacting this plan is not the library’s priority, unfortunately, but it is not off the radar yet.
This wiki was started as a cumulative class project for IST 676, Digital Libraries, of which I was a part in Fall 2009. At the end of the semester, it was decided that since we had developed so much content, it was worth the consideration of moving it from Sharepoint to a more public wiki for others to access. I and another student, as Faculty Assistants for Jill Hurst-Wahl, were responsible for anonymizing entries, refining pages, and updating the formatting to wiki mark-up.
Completed for IST 677, I created a digitization program proposition for the Everson Museum of Art‘s personal archive of documentation for the Ceramic Nationals expo. This assignment gave me experience in evaluating a collection, determining the users of the collection and their needs, and potential pitfalls in digitization as well as the benefits.
This was my final project for IST 681: Metadata, in which I devised a metadata scheme for a set of images (with fields as well for what they depicted…not best practice, but the subject matter of a photo is generally the most interesting and/or important, I think, and thus the most necessary to include) from my gravestone photo collection. This isn’t the most elegant of presentations, but it conveys what it needs to.
The main focus of my internship with Northern Onondaga Public Library. This was our iteration of Helene Blowers’s famous 23 Things project, the guided introduction to the hot topics of Web 2.0. The 23 Things blog, schedule, topics, and exercises were all my creation, with inspiration, of course, from the eponymous original and some other spin-offs.
- Copyright Policy Evaluation (.pdf)
The final paper for IST 600/copyright class was to find and evaluate the stated copyright policy of a library; I chose that of my alma mater, the University of Texas. This assignment helped me take a critical eye to the necessary copyright policies libraries ought to have in place for the protection of both the library and their users and to explore different considerations that libraries need to keep in mind when drafting their policy.
Informal Writing Samples
- Response (.doc) to Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, originally written in October 2008 for my Behind Information Design class. 772 words.
- Response (.doc) to Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, originally written in September 2008 for the aforementioned class. 689 words.
Formal Writing Samples
- Changing the TV: Advertisements, Adaptation, and Profit (.pdf). Originally written in May 2009 for my Introduction to Information Science class. 1,570 words.
Thesis statement: The future success of advertisement profits lies in marketers embracing the new technological frontiers creatively to entice an audience that has become accustomed to personalization and fast access.
- Digital Libraries: An Overview (.pdf) Originally written in December 2009 for IST 676. 5,158 words.
An expansive summary of the digital library concept, from the variety of definitions to types to functions, and an exploration of what digital libraries are not as well as what they could be (covering controversial topics like whether or not a DL can be pay-to-access or not). From there evaluate some of the problems facing digital libraries; finally, I speculate on the future of digital libraries.
