While I've been away (from blogging)

I've been a pretty inactive blogger these last two weeks. But then I've been really busy in real time. Things I wanted to catch people up on:

I've been working on a grant for some folks in West Virginia that have a public radio station and a library, and are applying for an IMLS Collaboration Grant. The deadline's March 1--and I'm trying to squeeze all the stuff in my brain and get it down on paper. Hope we make it! They have a bunch of oral history materials (tapes, photographs, etc.) they want to digitize and get online. Great...preservation (of the physical object--like decaying analog audio tapes), preservation (of the digital objects we'll create), and access (via the Internet), and access (to locals who might not have Internet). I'm going there over Spring Break to see what it's like. Might just be spending next year with sights like this:



or this...



Not bad, huh? Take me home, country roads.

It would be a wonderful, wild thing (like West Virginia itself! HA!) to work in a rural library that'd be exploring these sort of issues. The collaboration would be between the library, the radio station (the only one in the county thanks to the enforced silence of the FCC due to the proximity of the National Radio Observatory), and the local Historical Society. A lot of the work would be done with volunteers and the local library staff. I've always wondered how we could get the public radio stations in on the preservation curve. They're so much in the moment--yet if they produce, create, or record original content, then their stuff is definitely worth saving and archiving, (and making available to all). To have a broadcast or production studio that takes all this into account would be awesome. And then there's the library who'd be the likely people to manage the access issues...at least the physical copies and the servers. So much to think about-metadata, T1 lines, mirror sites, webpage creation, offsite archiving, and collection-level records. And to think of the amount I've learned in two years here at Indiana. I have been very lucky to come here and study with the best.