Information Architect, UX Researcher, COO, CPO, Instructor, Facilitator
…and for my first piece of post-MLIS magic, I started a project cataloging cows. Literally. It’s a small cattle ranch management app and won’t be public. Mostly coding and connecting to no-SQL database MongoDB, which is based in JSON and has interesting linked data possibilities.
I have also started interning at Architecture_MPS, an online architecture journal. I am developing an image archive of presidential campaign photos from 2000 to 2012. More when there is something to show.
My Information Architecture class conducted a semester-long, group project to develop a website prototype for a small business or nonprofit group. My group, including Eleanor Meyer, Jan Diolola, Storey Radziunas and me, formed a group called Community Design and selected the West 104th Street Block Association as our client. Since I have a prior relationship with the block association as the caretaker of their digital newsletter repository, I had close access to members of the association board and the community and knew that their site was in desperate need of a facelift.
We each selected a different user population to study including senior citizens and older adults, families living in the neighborhood, young families considering a move to the neighborhood and couples without children. My group presented our design to the block association, who has agreed to adopt it for their next redesign. Next step is building the thing. Congrats, Team!
Read more about this project at my Pratt SILS E-Portfolio:
This Fall I participated in two digital archives projects, where I served on the metadata team. The first was an oral history archive for dance journalist, Barbara Newman, who had a collection of interviews from the 1970s to this past year, in which she spoke with dancers, choreographers and others affiliated in the dance community. The interviews were primary sources for Ms. Newman’s book Grace Under Pressure. The website, Dance Dialogues, is a compilation of interviews from several of her books. I participated on the metadata team, where we ensured that our classmates’ records were properly tagged with our selected schema. I also digitized interviews with Mark Morris and tagged and uploaded interviews with Katie Wade and Robert Denvers.
The second project was for the American Jewish Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History with their Jews in America project. The goal of the project is to create a gateway to Jewish heritage artifacts at institutions across the United States. My team selected the Charleston College Low Country Digital Library, which has a rich collection of oral histories and papers from American Jewry in the Charleston region. We selected collections from LCDL that best fit the Jews in America vision, harvested metadata and URLs from the collection and delivered it to AJHS for inclusion in their database. I recently ran into Susan Malbin at the 2nd Annual METRO Conference, who told me that the Charleston team was one of two of the four class projects that would likely be included in the Jews in America repository. Congrats, Team!
An e-Portfolio is one of the degree requirements for the Pratt MSLIS program. I just sent mine in and a few minutes later, I got a note that I passed. Now I can focus on my class projects.
My e-Portfolio