Week 13 – October 5th

I did not post last week because I was working from my apartment and spent the entire time sending emails, so nothing really excited happened. I was working on sending out the survey link to the entire spreadsheet list that I have been working on putting together the past couple of weeks. I sent out individual emails to those places I had personal email addresses for and for those that I did not we decided on a mass email having everyone blind-copied.

This week has been a bit of a surprise and a bit frustrating. When I got in this morning it was to find out that over the week or so we have received over 500 responses to our survey. This is way more than we expected to get all together. However, only about 200 of these responses actually finished the entire survey. This was all surprising.

I met up with Frances first thing after checking on the survey to talk about the plan for today. Frances asked me to start looking into data analysis tools that we could use to explore the data and find trends and such.

I spent the first half of the day looking into these different programs and finding myself frustrated by them and how to use them. They were not self-explanatory tools. I spoke with  Frances about this and then she asked me to pull reports from on SurveyMonkey to see what the trends may have been.

I got frustrated with this. I have never done data analysis and I found that I had very little help from the Preservation team. I do not know what I am looking for or how to really use the SurveyMonkey to look at data analysis. This was one of those times where I just did not get enough help from someone on this. So even though I worked all day on this I do not feel like I made any headway. I am hoping that come next week Frances may have some time to help me and we can try to figure out how to use one of the sites or something to do the data analysis.

Week 11 – September 21st

Another day and another surprise. Today much of my work was spent on reading through a rough draft for a chapter of a book that the NEDCC is taking part in writing. This chapter was focusing on audio preservation. Jessica was happy to have me in that day and reading it because I have not had much exposure to audio preservation or that many different types of audio. She asked me to work through the draft a few times and make notes to things that were unclear. The staff within the NEDCC deal with these topics and questions regularly, but I was able to offer a more novice look at the chapter.

I circled any terms that were used that I did not know or thought a definition would be useful for. After a first run through on terms I went back and read it again for general comprehension. The first section was jumbled and jumped around a lot. I felt entirely confused, but the next few sections were much better. I made notes all over the draft she had given me and returned it to her for edits.

Later in the day I had another tech-inq. about the recommended DPI for negatives. A librarian emailed detailing that she has hundreds of acetate negatives and would like to scan them for preservation, but after doing several felt that 300 and 400 DPI were too low. I spent my time researching the matter within the NEDCC’s preservation leaflets, the LOC preservation guides and blogs and finally finding what I wanted within the FADGI (Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative). FADGI recommends 4000 DPI, which seems very high. I spoke with Terrance D.Ambrosio, who is the director of image services at the NEDCC for his recommendation. Terrance said that FADGI’s numbers were the ideal, but they are often not available to regular scanners. He recommended to digitize in-house as high a DPI as your scanner allows and then to follow preservation housing procedures to protect the negatives. I wrote an email detailing this information and sent it to Eva before she made edits and sent it on to the librarian.

The last bit of news, our survey has gone live! On Wednesday Frances had taken my drafts for notices and edited them and was getting ready to send out the survey. Our first wave went out to all the listservs the NEDCC is part of and to colleagues who agreed to help distribute the survey.

Next week is the Digital Preservation Conference. This is a huge conference that the NEDCC staff put on every year, so I will not be in the office as everyone will be gone. My assignment for the week however will be to start sending the email asking for participation in our survey to the list of individual institutions I have put together. I will be able to do this from home and maybe spend some time in the sun!

THIS JUST IN: Jessica has secured a preservation pre-assessment with the Cambridge Historical Society. She was hoping to be able to take me to shadow an assessment while I was with the NEDCC and has gotten it! On October 20th, she and I will go to the Cambridge Historical Society for a preservation pre-assessment.

So my schedule now stands as thus, I will be away from the NEDCC next week on the 28th, I will be in on the 5th regularly. The following week we are planning two days in a row the 12th and 13th. The entire next week I am taking from my regular job and I will be with the NEDCC Monday-Thursday (17th-20th). The following week of the 24th, Frances and I will make our way to New York for the PASIG Conference to present on our most basic patterns and data from the respondents we have accumulated (I hope there will be enough!).

 

Week 10 – September 14th

Today was a day of writing. We sent out one more email in a last-ditch effort to get feedback on the survey from our test panel. We have received on two responses back from the 10 people who agreed to help us. We are hoping by the end of the week to have a few more before we begin sending out the survey. I spent much of my day working on drafting an email to send out to various listserv’s and individual organizations. I also worked on a Twitter/Facebook and social media post about it on the NEDCC website. The last bit of writing I worked on for the day was an intro heading for the survey. I sent them all to Frances for her to add and make corrections.

We are hoping to have the survey begin to go out on Monday!! We had planned originally for it to have gone out last week, but that did not go according to plan. We are going to release the survey in waves. Beginning first with the listservs we have pulled together, then to individuals who have agreed to distribute on our behalf, and then to individual organizations we have found and who like to reach out to.

Toward the end of the day Frances and I got together to discuss October plans. We have secured our spot presenting on Day 1 of Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) in New York. I will be taking the train out on Tuesday evening to New York and checking into a hotel near where the conference is being held. Frances will meet me there in the morning and together we are going to present our information at PASIG. I am going be leaving later that night to head back to Boston. Frances is staying with her sister-in-law for the remainder of the week and weekend.

I am nervous about presenting this information because I am worried about the amount of data we will get back in that time period. I am also nervous because the last time I did a big presentation like this was in my senior year of my Undergrad at the Undergraduate Research Conference and, realistically, fewer people attended my presentation there than I think will attend our presentation at PASIG. I think it will be a great experience, but a terrifying one as well.

We have also been talking about my schedule for October. I am going to work with NEDCC more frequently leading up to the Conference. Our plan at the moment has me there on the 12th and 13th for some data analysis and then again for three days on the 17th, 18th, and 19th for designing of our presentation and a dry run with the Conservation Lab staff. With these extra’s days it looks like my hours will be fulfilled by the end of the conference.

Jessica and I are planning to have some time next week to talk about the coming weeks as she will be gone for 3 weeks. We are going to plan about what can be accomplished in my time left with the NEDCC and ensuring that I will have enough to do while she is away.

All in all it was a successful day at the NEDCC, the bad part was the drive home from Andover. I was stuck in the tunnel in Boston for an hour because a truck had broken down and backed up traffic.

Week 3 – July 28th

This week I spent much of my day working on creating the survey we would be putting out. We decided it would be better for our panel of experts to see the survey and be able to take it to give us better feedback. During the day Frances worked to finish up the questions while I worked to input them and design the survey. Our hope was to finish the survey yesterday and have it sent out for our panel. However, we were not able to finish. Frances and Jessica met to discuss vocabulary and then I finished the survey after some word changes. Frances did not have enough time before the end of the day to look it over and approve it. I kept an eye on my NEDCC email after I left because I said I would be able to and happy to send it later if she had time to finish looking it over. I also worked on some tech responses yesterday as well. Eva sent me two tech question; one dealing with a diary in need of repairs and the other about digitally preserving facebook photo albums. I drafted emails back and sent them to Eva and she made adjustments and sent out the answers.

Towards the end of the day we have a meeting. One the 4th Wednesday of each month the preservation team has a monthly meeting. I sat in on this meeting. I got to hear about all the upcoming projects, the funding, and what they are hoping to do for the coming year. It is interesting to see how the workshops and conferences get talked about in the infancy. It was a good day all around I think.

*Update: Today I checked my email to keep an eye on things and I was able to send out the survey today after Frances went through the survey and made changes.