Sarah Zdenek’s Weblog

As the semester wraps up I have a few things to finish up.  One, I have been curating a Des Moines Artists Collection for the Daily Palette.  So far I have a clip from the film A Little Salsa on the Prairie that was written by one of my favorite professors, Jody Swilky, who teaches at Drake University.  I have a piece from my husband who is an illustrator and graphic designer.  A painting from a Grand View professor.  A photograph from a professional artist, Susan Johnson.  A mini sub-collection from a family of artists.  And a poem from a local published writer.  I think it provides a strong balance in types of art and I like the family aspect as well.

I have dropped off a hard drive to DP’s Craig Dietrich to collect the video files from Iowa at 30 Frames Per Second.  I will be converting as many as I can starting next week.  Also, Chris and I have the opportunity to talk about our projects through DLS with a visiting librarian from Senegal on Tuesday.  I am excited to see what he thinks of the Iowa Writes Collection.

After spending weeks researching cataloging schema with the intent of updating the current eGranary system, Cliff and I sat down and talked about the practicality of a hybrid system.  We are now going to open up our ideas to the larger librarian world.  We will be setting up a WIKI to collect feedback.  I just need to get our question formulated and an explanation of what we have thought of so far.  Cliff is off again this Sunday and won’t return until the semester is over, so we will be working through email to get this done.

I have exciting news, the Iowa Writes Collection is now part of the permanent collection through DLS. Here is the link, enjoy!

Iowa Writes

I just finished the last of the images for Daily Palette’s Iowa Writes Archive.  Wow, I may have carpal tunnel.  So the next step is to combine them with all of the metadata into CONTENTdm and they will be visible to the public.

Cliff left this morning for two and a half weeks in Ethiopia so I have a list of things to work on while he is gone and I plan to get the Daily Palette videos formatted and up as well.  Should be a busy couple of weeks.

I am within a week or so of getting all of the Iowa Writes entries into contentDM in at least the first version. There will need to be some changes as Daily Palette is planning on fixing a few programming idiosyncrasies that have created some oddities in the formatting I have been “screen shooting.” They have also sent over to DLS the full text of each entry and other important information. Mark and I will have two work sessions together this next week to get these pieces included into the records.

On the WiderNet front I have been learning about Enterprise Manager and making tables and views. I also started creating a webpage to display the information being pulled from the database. The best part about this whole project has been how closely connected the work I am doing has been with what I am learning in Database Systems. I really feel that this part of my fellowship and my course are dovetailing in the most efficient way possible.

Cliff spent a ton of time with me this week working on creating tables and appropriate views for the soon to be functional catalogers interface.  I will be spending time working on tidying up the look of the interface and adding in some functionalities Cliff and I agree need to be included.

I also met with Jen and Mark about some cataloging issues, or more so consistency issues, with the Daily Palette entries.  Seems like we’ve ironed out most everything I have run into so far.  I had a meeting with the Daily Palette staff and the Iowa Review to talk about progress and next steps for the Iowa Writes collection.  There are numerous other avenues that will be explored for possible content in the coming months/years.

I would like to give a big CONGRATULATIONS to the Daily Palette for its upcoming 1250th entry!  Amazing!  I too hope it goes on forever and that DLS continues to archive its contents into the master collection.

The past few weeks I have been meeting with Jon and Christina to discuss my part in curating a small collection for Daily Palette.  As soon as I get the Iowa Writes records into CONTENTdm, I will begin to focus my work on this.  So far I have entered about one hundred Iowa Writes pieces into CONTENTdm but have run into numerous issues with how records need to be named and what fields are available.  Jen and I will meet this week to try to iron out some of the quirks.  For example, sometimes a single author had multiple poems appear on the Daily Palette on one specific day.  We had originally assumed that each day would have only one entry so this is a conundrum.  There are also issues with translations and acknowledging the translators.  I have been keeping pages of notes to go over with Jen and once everything is fixed then I will be able to move things out of permissions limbo and into the general collection.  

I spent Monday morning with Mark learning the steps for entering DP Iowa Writes content/screen shots into ContentDM.  Once I got past the shininess of Vista, I felt comfortable with what needed to be done.  We had planned on a meeting with DP staff on Wednesday to determine certain aesthetic details for the screen shots and other metadata standards but then the snow storm hit and the day and all classes were canceled.  This, along with a raging case of strep throat caused me to miss a meeting with Cliff as well.  Looks like next week will be catch up week.

This semester I am continuing to work at WiderNet (on a different project) and also trying something completely different working at DLS on the Daily Palette collection.  These first two weeks have been a whirlwind of meetings and emails as all parties involved work to set up expectations and schedules for each of my projects.  This week I did have the opportunity to sit in on a librarianship meeting at WiderNet and begin my asp training.  Cliff is taking me under his wing so to speak and teaching me tons about all aspects of asp and databases.   He will be out of town at the beginning of the week, but he left me with homework.  I created a series of forms using FrontPage and now I will make adjustments to the database the program will automatically generate.  I will spend the time he is on his business trip to brainstorm who will be using what data and how they will need to be able to manipulate it when cataloging.

Next week I will be meeting with Mark Anderson and Jon Winet regarding Daily Palette work.  Mark and I are going to go over goals on Monday and Jon and I will meet Wednesday to talk about aesthetics.

I had a reply from Ted Hamilton with OSEC (he happens to be an University of Iowa MLS alumnus from the 1980s). We are going to keep a dialog going even though my project is wrapping up. He wants the chance to look at a partnership between OSEC and WiderNet to help school children on South Dakota reservations.

Cliff let me know during the last portal meeting that my project will end once I leave due to the lack of funding. This was expected, but still disappointing. I am not sure that all domestic eGranary plans will be put on hold, I think the prison work will continue. However, the K-12 project will now be cryogenically frozen, ala Walt Disney.

In my last days, I created another portal.  This one was a Biological Sciences portal for Dr. Coulter to look at and add content specific sub-headings.

A number of interesting things came up this week.  First, Cliff and I met with Dr. Coulter about the needs of tribal colleges and Biological Science curriculum and course delivery.  We discussed the role of the National Science Foundation in Dr. Coulter’s work and the possibility of a partnership in developing a portal or other means of content delivery.  Cliff explained the Knowledge Sphere concept and how it may be implemented to help entire communities with access and a safe, organized digital library.  Dr. Coulter has some contacts at specific tribal colleges that may allow us to test out some options.

Following up on a lead from Ryan from TFA, I have been researching the educational standards for reservation K-12 schools and the work done by the OSEC (Oseti Sakowin Educational Consortium). 

But the biggest news is that I created my first portal for teachers!  At this point the information is organized into four types-Math, Science, Language Arts, and teacher resources.  The teacher resources are in a browsable table whereas the other sections are split up into more specific subjects.  Next week I will try to contact Ted Hamilton at the OSEC and continue to add resources to my portal while creating more subheadings to establish a hierarchy.