January 21, 2009

I spoke with Dan today about how I can narrow my responsibilities down because I was feling pretty overwhelmed by the amount of work there is to be done. On top of school and work, this would going to eat up all of my time! He definitely calmed my fears about it, emphasizing that he'd rather have me here to develop the procedures and delegate tasks than do actual work. This changes everything. I have to take what I learn about their system and how I think it should be done, and repackage it so that others can learn the correct methods of doing it. I have to come up with a way to make it more understandable.
So the video conversion project shouldn't be as difficult as I initially thought. I made a powerpoint presentation with screen grabs of the different steps in the process. Because I'm working with student workers (all of them young and artistic), I need ot develop a manual that takes their learning styles into consideration. They tend to be very visual and tactile learners, so my manual should reflect that. I also need to research the legal aspect of converting VHS which the library owns, to DVD. Dan sees it as a preservation necessity (and I sort of agree), but we may need to get the artists' permission to make the copies, and in that case I may need to begin drawing up a form letter which we can send to each artist whose film we wish to duplicate.
For the cataloging project, I need to find a way to train an already overworked staff how to do more work. I think that my main task will be to develop a list of controlled vocabulary, using LoC and the Art & Architecture Thesaurus so that we enter more descriptive words in the records, making each item more easily searchable. Right now they have no catalogers on staff, and the person doing the cataloging is a part-time employee with no formal library training. Most of the cataloging is copy cataloging from WorldCat or Library of Congress. But they have many obscure and student-made items in the catalog which do not show up in WorldCat or LoC. So having a list to reference will be helpful down the road.