Kathleen Fear

The University of Chicago | July/August 2008

I created documentation and a workflow for selecting, reviewing and reformatting obsolete media in the library's circulating collection. The focus, at this point, is on floppy disks, but over time the library will review other formats, including CDs and DVDs, which form a substantial part of the circulating collection. I also put together a report comparing different institutional approaches to providing access to their digitized AV materials.

• Project deliverables:
  • Institutional Approaches to Delivering AV Material Online [pdf]
  • Floppy Disk Preservation at the University of Chicago [pdf]
  • Poster presented at ALA Midwinter [pdf]

Iowa State University | May/June 2008

I developed a set of recommendations around standards and best practices for metadata, technology, and content management for ISU's digital library program and helped to plan what will be the library's first major digital collection: George Washington Carver's papers. I also worked with ISU's conservator to learn advanced book repair techniques.

• Project deliverables:
  • Recommendations for Building a Digital Repository [pdf]

University of Michigan Copyright Website | Winter 2008

Over the course of a semester, I worked with U-M's copyright specialist in researching new areas of content for the copyright website, including the philosophical basis of copyright law, Creative Commons, and Open Access. I created new content, edited the site and added search functionality.

Entertainment Weekly's EW.com | Winter 2008

In preparation for the publication of their 1,000th issue, Entertainment Weekly scanned its back issues and put them online. I worked to edit and format article and fix metadata as needed. This work was done remotely, under the supervision of EW's database librarian in Rochester.

Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan | Sept. 2007 - present

As an electronic publishing assistant, I am responsible for converting born-digital material to XML for online publication. I copyedit and proofread; run scripts to convert files from Quark, PDF, Microsoft Word and other formats; create scripts in PERL to aid in conversion where necessary; and have participated in other projects, including working on the digitalculturebooks website, creating a inventory of rights agreements for SPO's various publications, and compiling statistics for use in an impact study of our published journals.

The following are examples of some projects I have worked on:

• Best of Technology Writing 2008: converted book from Quark to XML; created hyperlinks for footnotes, titles, author names, and index.
• The Journal of Electronic Publishing: copyedited articles; converted articles from HTML and Word documents to XML.

Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan | Sept. 2007 - April 2008

I took part in a massive rehousing and cataloging project in the mollusk department. Every one of the 5 million mollusks in the collection had to be counted, cataloged, rehoused and georeferenced. I worked with two other catalogers to pull specimens, match them with their labels, enter data into an online database, rehouse the specimens in archival containers, and reorganize the collection by species.

Contextual Inquiry and Project Management | Fall 2007

The Ann Arbor Center for Independent Living is an outreach and advocacy center for the disabled population in and around Ann Arbor. In this project, 4 other students and I conducted an analysis of the information flows in the organization with the goal of improving their grant-writing process. Over the course of a semester, we carried out a rapid contextual design technique; we interviewed a number of people within the organization and held interpretation sessions to decontruct the interviews, modelled the information flows in different ways, built an affinity diagram, and finally, made and presented a set of recommendations to the organization.

Preserving Information/Advanced Preservation Administration | Fall 2007

This course project spanned two half-semester courses. The first half of the project centered around conducting a needs assessment for the Matthaei Botanical Gardens' collection of maps; my group conducted several site visits and interview as well as a collection survey. Based on our findings, in the second half of the semester, we developed a preservation plan for the care and digitization of the collection.

Digitization for Preservation | Winter 2008

The Labadie Collection is the world's most comprehensive assembly of social protest material. Their subject vertical files contain over 10,000 folders worth of newspaper clippings, hand-printed flyers, and other ephemeral material. Our goal for this project was to write a grant proposal for IMLS funding to be able to digitize this collection. I worked in a group of 4 students for the duration of this 7-week course project; we conducted an interview of the collection curator and a survey of the collection in order to gather information for our proposal.