I’m excited about this session on partnerships and technology! We have speakers from University of Mary Hardin-Baylor (Anne Price and Kathy Harden) and The ResCarta Foundation (John Sarnowski).
Internships for Impact
by Anne Price and Kathy Harden from Townsend Memorial Library, small private Christian university with about 3,000 students. Therefore the library has departments of one staff member.
Talking about turning work/study positions into “internships” (mainly internships focusing on design) that meet the library’s and users’ needs. Students are one of the greatest assets. Students and librarians benefit from having an internship program.
Suggestions for creating beneficial partnerships and relationships: create internal and external relationships. Partner with your Art or Graphic Design departments in order to get students with design skills into the library.
Having support from the Library Director is extremely important to building successful programs. [As with so much, having support from upper administration is such a vital element in successful partnerships.]
Benefits to students: develop their portfolios, develop people skills, and get more experience.
Need to give students room to experiment and grow in internships in order to have successful project outcomes.
Student interns help re-design the library’s website and graphics. [Actually, it looks like the interns create almost the entire library website including page templates and stylesheets.] Students also work on READ posters. The students decided to create their own mini-READ posters to see who could be the most creative. Super-popular project and have a waiting list for people who want to be on the posters! [So cool!]
The student interns have also created bookmarks, business cards, and brochures. The library no longer has to outsource the work for business cards, etc. Students also create all the signage and the maps for the library.
The library partners with Career Services as well. Students work on graphics for Career Services, too. They create posters, website graphics.
Some pitfalls: students graduate, students lose eligibility for work-study, sometimes students don’t work out, and the internships are just work-study (they don’t make a lot of money and will go with a better offer).
But, overall, internships are fabulous and worth the time and energy to set up and run.
Builidng a Community Memory by Hosting a “ScanDay”
by John Sarnowski
Non-profit, has open source software using METS and MODS to create digital objects. Software available via the website: ResCarta.org.
Worked with small libraries on a grant for ScanDay. Trying to get smaller institutions to use the software. If library would host ScanDay, ResCarta would bring hardware and software (10 laptops and used ethernet rather than wifi; 5 flatbed scanners), train volunteers, and create a website in one day. The patrons brought in locally important materials, digitize items, metadata created, patrons received CD of their materials, and a website was created that they could share with friends and family.
ScanDay got patrons connected with the library. Patrons really enjoyed the ScanDay. Lots of great items that were unknown before. Worked with the local historical societies. It was a great way for families to connect and share.
How to do a ScanDay: marketing and publicity to drum up support and interest; round up staff and volunteers to work the scan stations and greeting stations, plus photograhy stations; training on scanners and computers; technology needed: scanners, cameras, computers; paper intake forms (like accession forms and deed of gift for archives).
Flatbed scanning (used Canon Lide scanners): scan worksheet and save to directory, scan items, capture as JPEG, crop/rotate if needed and checked off the items. Software does have the ability to do TIFF images, too.
Document scanning (Fujitsu scanner): used rotary scanner for documents and also more modern photographs that could withstand the scanning
Slide scanning (Nikon CoolScan 5000): had a lot of 35mm slides and VueMaster slides.
Photography: very simple photography set-up.
Gave patrons CD with the images at the end of scanning.
Post-production: OCR text documents, add metadata from intake forms, created a collection per patron using ResCarta software, and created website using ResCarta software.
Training Day: 4 hours of training session for all.
On ScanDay: Setup began at 8am and metadata was complete by 8pm. Scanning from 9am to 2pm.
Results: In Westby, 700 images scanned. 185 images on website. In Galesville, 1400 images scanned. 1200 on website. You can see these slides (with URLs to city’s websites) through the ResCarta site.
Takeaway
Give your students responsibilities and the space to experiment, they will create amazing projects for your library. I’m blown away by the creativity and beauty of the designs created by the students shown by Price and Harden in their presentations.