The first Day, Monday 01/09/12

The school term started on 01/09/12, and yes - I was out in St. Pete starting fieldwork! Its all good though, I love hanging out and doing things in the archive. So after a trip to the Dali Museum, for an assignment for my Libraries as Cultural Heritage course, I got to the Nelson Poynter Library for the afternoon.

Time There: 1pm - 4pm (Completion: 3 of 120 hours)

Activities:

• I worked on a continuation of a project that I had helped with last semester as a volunteer for the USFSP Digital Archive. This project deals with the scans of thesis projects from previous years. My 'job' here is quality control round one. I open up pdf files and check the quality of the scans. this means overall quality as well as looking for missing pages, out of order pages, and OCR completion. Professor Schnur will do the final quality control check before merging the files together and uploading them to the digital archive.
• I also did some minor re-shelving of a few special collections books in the Mark Twain collection. 

General Things from that session:

• We did discuss ideas for a paper/project/presentation for the SFA annual meeting.
• Next scheduled 'work' day (hopefully) is Saturday, 01/14/12. 
• I do think Professor Schnur worries a bit that he bores me with the OCR QC, but honestly I don't mind at all. It reminds of my Archaeology course as an undergrad. Not everyone has experiences like Lara Croft or Indiana Jones, sometimes the events are just ordinary run of the mill things. I like it because these experiences are showing me how the digital archive is actually coming together. Seeing the step by step process from paper items to scanned items, to ingested (uploaded) items, to the final release in D-Space is really fascinating. I hope when I receive my job in the archive field I will be able to use things like D-Space and my experiences from USFSP to build a great digital archive. 

Fieldwork in an Archive...

What is this? And why I am doing it?
This blog has been created as a basic working diary for my adventures while completing my fieldwork course in my final semester as an LIS Graduate student. As a go to reference my goal is to make an entry here for each day that I proceed to do fieldwork for the semester. For the requirements, I have to complete 120 hours with in about 4 months with bi-weekly reports of time and activities.

Where am I at? And who am I working with?
My fieldwork is been done at University of South Florida, St. Petersburg under the direction of Professor James Schnur. He is the sole Archivist at USFSP and has many projects that he works with. He is working very hard on the digital archive for the university, and I will be assisting him as I can on this endeavor throughout the term.

So that is the who, what, when , and why of things. For anyone that is up to following these posts, enjoy the adventures in archiving.