Back to training and instruction
Recently I accepted an Interim Student Supervisor role and I'm very delighted that it gives me the opportunity to be back to supervising, training and instruction!
I love teaching and instruction and I love to develop teaching materials and instruction sessions. This interim role reminded me how much I missed the interaction with students and how much passion I put in developing training materials!
Recently, I trained the student assistants who are the metadata creators in our Digital Collections department how to interpret the Metadata Application Profile and how to apply the new large-scale rules in practice.
Training always gives me that feeling of accomplishment that my efforts make a difference and improve someone else's work performance!
Interested to see my latest training session? Check out the slides in the Presentations section
LITA Webinar: In-house vs outsourced digitization
Recently, I presented a 60-min webinar on topic In-house vs. Outsourced Digitization: similarities, key differences and pitfalls to avoid. I was privileged to prepare this session for LITA (Library and Information Technology Association) Online Learning (details).
The webinar compared similarities and contrasted key differences between in-house and outsourced digitization and wrapped up with some pitfalls to avoid in order to streamline the workflow and succeed on the project.
I was nicely surprised to get public librarians in the audience - it makes me happy to know that public libraries are embracing digitization initiatives for preserving and making historic materials accessible online.
Slides and abstract are available in the Presentation section. Alternatively, use this link to jump to presentation -- click here
Outsourcing digitization and vendor relations
During the summer my case study article discussing outsourced digitization and establishing vendor relations was published.
It has been a successful article and several people reached out for more details and ideas they can borrow and implement in their work.
Personally I could have benefited a lot from a similar article when I first started to manage the Nevada Digital Newspaper Project - for me establishing vendor relations was a new challenge and I had some trial and error during the process. Sharing my experience with fellow librarians has proven to be helpful and definitely fills a gap in the literature. Many articles dedicated to outsourced digitization simply outline technical details, but none of them discusses establishing vendor relations and strategies for successful partnership. My face lights up every time when I get an email about our work on the outsourced project and how we succeed in this initiative.
Link to article in full text: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15332748.2019.1642701
Metadata work in exciting!
Metadata work is exciting!
Metadata has always been an area that I wanted to plunge in and dedicate some time to explore and test different methods for achieving more consistency and efficiency.
Over the past 8 months I was privileged to work on several large-scale metadata projects and participate in the process that we call ETL (extract, transform, load)
I was involved in the biggest metadata remediation project at UNLV Digital collections. As we are migrating to a new DAMS we had to clean up thousands of records to prepare the data sets for move. Yes, that's right - thousands! I successfully completed cleaning up of over 125,000 legacy metadata records. This included mapping to new metadata fields, cleaning up subjects, subject analysis of data sets, analyzing subject scope notes and mapping subjects from controlled vocabularies we no longer use (TGM, LCSH) to FAST and ATT terms that we adopted; work on the genre field and genre terms, remediation and authority files updates with thousands of name authorities. The process was a roller coaster with many ups and downs, but eventually all my remediated metadata turned out great! During the process I experimented with different methods and multiple approaches so I can efficiently move through the clean up process and I learned how to achieve consistency not just in one collection, but in all collections of our institution.
For all my remediation work I used Excel - it's such a powerful tool that allows various types of data transformations. I was so fascinated from what I can accomplish in Excel so I held a 75-min workshop at the Joint Annual Meeting of the Conference of Inter-mountain Archivists and the Society of Southwest Archivists. At that workshop I shared some of my best practices for efficient data clean up.
Additionally, I was invited to deliver a metadata overview presentation for beginners at the Nevada Statewide Large-scale Digitization Workshop held at the UNLV Libraries.
Links to the presentation slides are available below for more information.
Metadata rules and knowing how to manage it is a mandatory skill for all digital librarians!
Data Remediation at Scale: How to Clean Up Your Metadata Quickly and Effectively Using Excel
A 75-min workshop focused on metadata remediation with Excel. It demonstrated different Excel functions and formulas used during the clean up process (Data Filter, TRIM, CONCATENATE, TEXTJOIN (insert module with VBA code), Duplicate Values (look up and remove), INDEX and MATCH, Find and Replace, MID, LEFT, RIGHT (break text/numeric string), CHAR(10) insert line break, remove end punctuation [;], Date clean up (clean messed up copy-pasted dates)
Slides available here
Metadata: An Overview for Digital Collections
Overview of the metadata role in resource description, resource discovery and website faceting. The presentation discusses metadata consistency, granularity and types (descriptive, administrative and structural) with emphasis on technical and preservation metadata. Additionally the presentation introduces the role of the controlled vocabularies and why they are important for achieving consistency.
Slides available here
Publications on digitization best practices
This past Spring was very fruitful and brought much fulfillment and pride from my scholarship efforts. Two of my articles got published. I co-authored one peer-reviewed article that filled a gap in the literature by providing unique perspective on large-scale digitization of three different types of archival materials. On the other hand, my solo article shares the UNLV Digital collections custom digitization and troubleshooting approach for various archival materials and outlines some best practices.
The publications are available below. If you want to get into details and read more, please go to Publications at http://marina-expertise.com/publications
Digitization Workflows: Streamlining the digitization process and distinguishing the peculiarities in capturing various archival materials
February, 2019
Against the Grain [vol. 31, number 1]
Link to full text: http://bit.ly/ATG-digitization-workflows
Microfilm, Manuscripts, and Photographs: A Case Study Comparing Three Large-Scale Digitization Projects
February, 2019
Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies [Vol. 6]
Link to full text: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol6/iss1/5/
Public speaking opportunities in Spring 2019
This spring season brings me exciting scholarship opportunities for public speaking! Stay tuned for more details!
Professional accomplishments in 2018
Last year, 2018, was very abundant in professional accomplishments and brought me many professional and networking opportunities.
It was a year full of challenges that provided numerous learning opportunities and some anxiety from the new and unexpected.
Now, as I'm looking back, I can only take pride of my high productivity, professional achievements and success! I have surpassed the goals set for the year, over-performing in all areas.
The beginning of the year is time for resolutions and I'm aiming even higher for 2019! Peer-reviewed publications, presenting at conferences - national and international (for the first time ever!) and larger scale work projects - all that is making me so thrilled and cherishing all opportunities that challenge me to go even further!
Click here to access full size version of the inforgraphic.
Fall 2018 is busy!
October 2018 has been so hectic for me! It brought me much recognition on statewide and national conferences as well as that sweet feeling of accomplishment and reward for my hard work during the past seven months!
In addition to my committee work as Programming Co-chair for the NLA Annual Conference and Planning Member of the NDSA DigiPres committee, I was honored to present at these amazing conferences that bring professionals across the U.S. to share ideas, expertise and experience.
Below you'll find the topics of my talks as well as other details and link related to them.
Digitization revealed
Abstract
101 crash course on the fundamentals of digitizing archival collections from start to finish.
This introductory level presentation discusses the basics of digitizing collections from start to finish. The author reveals some secrets as well as tips and tricks for achieving efficiency and sustainability of digital projects.
Get more details!
The digital librarian: the liaison between digital collections and digital preservation
Abstract
It’s common misconception digital librarians are involved only in digitizing historic materials. In fact managing digital projects is only their visible role. Once it’s over, librarians embrace their new role of information architects directly engaged in the digital preservation process of archiving master files. The digital librarian is that unit in the prep process for digital preservation that ensures meticulously organized archival directories, easy navigation and smooth file retrieval.
Get more details!
Watch lightning talk here.
Conference presentations in Fall 2018
I'm excited to share that recently I was honored to be invited as a presenter at 2 prestigious conferences happening this Fall - NDSA Digital Preservation in October (Las Vegas, NV) and LITA Forum in November (Minneapolis, MN).
At NDSA DigiPres I'll participate in the Minute Madness session, followed by a poster session, while at LITA Forum I'm teaching a workshop dedicated to web design.
More session details and times coming soon!
#digipres18 #LITAForum2018
ALA Annual was inspiring!
ALA Annual was inspiring!
There's no sweeter feeling of fulfillment and accomplishment than the one you get after successful presentations at conferences!
ALA Annual 2018 definitely brought much accomplishment and success for me. The conference preparation was an emotional roller coaster - anxiety, stress and hard work alternating with excitement, confidence and triumph.
The conference itself was such an intense long weekend full of emotions - a weekend that brought me inspiration and craving for more professional engagement. I attended informative and enlightening sessions, met nice and knowledgeable people, expanded my professional network and was invited to submit a proposal for publishing my research. But the most exciting of all were my sessions: I was featured in a panel session as a speaker and I was honored to have a poster session dedicated to project management! And all that on my first ALA conference! Isn't that awesome!?
ALA Annual is a such a great and inspiring venue full of professional and networking opportunities! I'm happy I was part of it and look forward the 2019 conference!
Links to my sessions
Panel
Title: New and Successful ways to Manage Library IT
Role: speaker
Talk topic: Achieving efficiency in large-scale digitization project management with free IT tools | an inspirational talk about task management and team motivation
Presentation slides available in PRESENTATIONS section
Poster
Title: Techniques for successful management of a large-scale newspaper digitization project with outsourced digitization: effective collaboration, increased productivity and outstanding final product
Role: presenter
Poster available in POSTERS section