A Day in the Life of Digital Collections

I joined the digital collections team in early December 2013, and from day 1 I have been immersed in the details of our long list of unique projects, all with their own set of schedules, stakeholders, and resource needs.  My task has also been to evaluate and improve our overall workflow, create outreach and promotional opportunities (like this blog!), and really anything else that comes up that is related to digital projects. What does that all mean in terms of day-to-day work? It means I attend A LOT of meetings.

Haitian Declaration of Independence
Just another day in the Digital Production Center imaging the Haitian Declaration of Independence!

Luckily most of my meetings are absolutely fascinating and revolve around very exciting projects and materials.  Here are some of my favorite meetings from the last few weeks.  Truth be told, I didn’t go to all of these in one day, but they are a pretty representative sample of the types of meetings I do attend everyday.

Haitian Declaration of Independence:  Perhaps you have heard that the Rubenstein library has a copy of this historic document?  The digital collections implementation team recently met with RL curator Will Hansen to discuss digitizing and providing access to the declaration, and of course he brought it with him.  Its not that large to be honest, but very impressive.  In DPPS we are using this project as catalyst to implement an image server and a new document viewing tool to provide better access to documents like the declaration.

 

“Girl Lost in Thought at Fast Food Counter” Image from the William Gedney Digital Collection

Workflows, Workflows, workflows:  Every week I attend operational meetings with both the Duke Digital Collections Implementation teams and the Digital Production Center to discuss work in progress, scheduling, new projects, and how to perfect our ever changing workflows.  I presented, along with my colleagues from Digital Projects and Production Services as part of our monthly ITS meeting, First Wednesday, on our overall process and some of the changes we have been making since I came on board.  Check out all of our slides! 

Gedney:  Duke Digital Collections patrons are no strangers to the William Gedney Photographs and Writings digital collection.  The physical collection is being re-processed and we will be digitizing more of it later in 2014.  This is a large project with a long timeline, but we are so excited to provide access to more materials in one of our most popular digital collections.

 

Early Greek MS:  the Rubenstein Library has a large collection of early Greek manuscripts.  Many items have already been digitized, and Rubenstein Technical Services is in the process of cataloging them.     Once cataloging is complete, we will be able to plan the publishing aspects of this project.  Both DPPS and our colleagues in the Collaboratory for Classics Computing are thrilled to provide access to digital versions of these items.

Stay tuned for continuing developments in these and all the other projects we have in progress!

GreekMS
A scanned image from one of the Greek Manuscripts in the Rubenstein collection.

 

Post authored by Molly Bragg