Group Meeting, August 12

  1. Announcements and updates Bob Scott announced that he, Meredith, Sarah, and Alex have had a proposal approved for the Digital Library Federation Forum in Atlanta this October. They will be doing a presentation on our Developing Librarian project.

  2. Design team report Karen Green reported on the latest progress of the Design Team, of which she is chair. The specifications decided on by the Design Team, regarding logos, homepage design, etc., are being turned over to the Development Team for further work. For a full report on the Design Team’s progress, see Karen’s August 15 posting “Design Team Update..”

  3. Redistributing Project Responsibilities One of our colleagues, Mary Cargill, will be retiring in October. She was one of the originators of the Morningside history project idea, and her expertise has enriched the historical awareness of the group from the beginning. She is a member of the Research and Editorial Team and had been researching the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum as her individual project component. We have agreed on the following adjustments in order to keep the project on track.

a. “Fact checking” will be removed from the responsibilities assigned to the Research and Editorial Team in our project agenda and time line. “Metadata standards” will be retained as the team’s key responsibility. Beginning in October, this team will simply be the Editorial Team. Each librarian creating exhibits will be responsible for maintaining and verifying the historical accuracy of his or her own exhibits. Since only one person is now left on the Editorial Team, we will need to be open to reassessing this workflow and providing further assistance as needed. b. The last research task of the Research and Editorial team before it shifts into Editorial mode will be a bibliography of selected key general sources relevant to the history of Morningside Heights. The deadline for this bibliography is September 30, 2014. c. Karen Green, who had earlier been focusing on the Lion Brewery, agreed to focus her exhibits on the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum instead.

  1. Open labs and instructional sessions The next two regularly scheduled meetings of the Developing Librarian group will be instructional sessions: 8/26 will be a Zotero session led by Bob Scott; 9/9 will be a session on uploading items to the project site, led by Alex Gil. Two open labs, at which people can work on whatever aspect of the project they wish, will be held during the week of 8/18-8/22.
John L. Tofanelli

Author: John L. Tofanelli

John is Columbia’s Librarian for British and American History and Literature. His research interests include literature and religion in 18th- and 19th- century Great Britain, textual criticism, and book history. He has enjoyed the chance to explore the early architectural history of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.