Journal, week 8
This week, I spent the day Judy Dowling and Donna Dorvick.
Judy's title at the library is Library Specialist—Metadata, but, practically speaking, she serves as a digital services technician for the library's cataloging team. Her role is to handle the management and execution of the library's digital assets and platforms, chief among them being Americana. I have been excited to learn about this site, which is self-described as a "deep connection between […] the two iterations of our holdings, the physical and the digital." The scope of the project is very ambitious; as I understand it, the ultimate goal is to have the library's entire collection digitized and available for public research (to the extent they are allowed to per copyright or other restrictions).
Judy taught me about digital services and talked about the process of moving digitized items (TIFFs, JP2s, and OCR’ed PDFs) onto Luna, and how Americana and the regular catalog front-end both use that collected data. She showed me reporting features, too, and how to utilize analytics. She recommended keeping up with some basic object-oriented programming languages, for example Python, for use in small ways, but said that learning the particular content management system your job uses is most important. I have some experience with programming in Python and JavaScript, so it was heartening to hear all of this.
Donna walked me through her process of digitizing rare books. She showed me the library’s Lightroom setup and how image files are created, exported, and processed. There’s a setup for large-format items but she had nothing to scan so she couldn’t demonstrate its use to me. We talked about the library's setup as compared to the one I used at Providence Public Library and agreed that while digitization can be fun it can also be a bit tedious at times. We joked that we both find it a great opportunity to catch up on podcasts.