Hours: 7.5 Total Hours: 7.5
I started out getting familiar with Digital Commons @ Otterbein. I browsed through all the collections, noting how much content was coming from each department, and what years content had been created in. The majority of content was from the previous year, the year in which the DC had started running. But some of the contributors had submitted earlier work as well, including a collection of postcards from all the way back in 1904. I noted down accessibility keys for easier navigation, and some errors from the FAQ page to be corrected.
My second task for the day was to begin working on a survey for faculty, staff, and administrators about their use of and familiarity with the DC. I began by reviewing surveys created by other institutions, including Bepress, the host of our DC. I also looked at the survey that was used during the creation of our DC. I then put together questions from all of these surveys to create a rough draft of the Use Survey.
As a break from the DC work, Jane asked me to take a look at a weeding project of VHS tapes. These tapes had fairly low circulation numbers, for the most part, and decisions had to be made about whether to keep, replace, or discard the items. Having limited subject knowledge, but a head for numbers, I reviewed this list and added a new spreadsheet to the file with my recommendations for each item.
Towards the end of the day, we had a meeting with Janice and Jim from the Art Department to discuss an upcoming Ceramics Symposium they are hosting. This will be the first event held using the Digital Commons to promote and preserve it. We discussed the event, registration requirements, the website design, and what to preserve from the event. During this discussion, we discovered a good number of questions to be added to the event request form, and a number of things to promote awareness about. The amount of different objects we could preserve in the DC after the event had not occurred to the organizers, and would be a good thing to let everyone know about.
At the end of the day, I attended a reception to welcome a new sculpture into the library family. It is a sculpture called “Learning” by Zimbabwean artist Shamu Musandi, a part of the Spirits in Stone collection. Here is a video about the collection, from YouTube: