October 22nd - MLA!

Today Sheila and I attended the Mississippi Library Association annual conference in Natchez. It was a great opportunity because we were able to see the poster talk on the scrapbook digitization project by Amanda Myers, the previous intern that had worked on the project and who had implemented the metadata spreadsheet and investigated hosting potential with the Louisiana Digital Library (LDL/LOUIS). Her poster session, "Digitizing on a Budget: Increasing Access to Scrapbooks at the New Orleans Museum of Art", was informative in many ways, especially the fact that she determined the scans from the MagicWand met Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) standards, as I've been concerned about the quality of the scans, but had not had a chance to investigate whether they would meet any standards that an organization such as the LDL might require. It looks like the files we are creating meet the standards for 'Documents' in the Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials (http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/FADGI_Still_Image_Tech_Guidelines_2015-09-02_v4.pdf) 2010 version on the FADGI site, but that some of the distortions we encounter o uncontrollable page edges may not comply with the 2015 version when it is released. Of course, NOMA does always have the option of displaying the final files and metadata via their Piction asset management system without having to meet LDL or FADGI standards, but still supplying a more than adequate product to users.

The conference was also an excellent chance for me to meet USM classmates in person, as well as my professors past and present--Dr. Griffis and Dr. Welsh. We arrived at the conference in time to catch the last half of Dr. Griffis' presentation on the history of SLIS at USM, "Library Science Education at Southern Miss: A History of Survival and Growth". I was once again impressed with the history of my own education, especially the early adoption of Internet-based distance education. I was also able to meet and speak with Director Welsh, my practicum advisor and the professor that taught me everything I needed to know about scholarly research and publication. I can't begin to express how grateful I am for USM and its faculty for offering me a distance-accessible, affordable, professional, diverse, inter-disciplinary and high-quality LIS education. There are just not enough adjectives for me to write down--it's really that good. It is certainly among the elite programs of its kind in the U.S. and the South.

After poster sessions and lunch, I dropped in on the 3-D Printing session to satisfy my "public library youth services employee" heritage, and then moved over to "Promoting Mississippi Archives: The SMA/MDAH Partnership", a presentation given by Ryan Semmes of the Mississippi State University Libraries and Jennifer Bannock of USM. Since I now work in the City Archives/Louisiana Division of New Orleans Public Library, promoting archives is a central part of my work. They actually covered a now defunct area archival cross-training initiative championed by one of the former Head Archivists in my division; I was depressed to learn the site and program were no longer going. I do feel that maybe as part of a public library, my workplace already has a vested interest in promoting archives through programming, but it is always important to hear about what other archives are thinking about.