Other literary institutions are typically invited to 'table' at the event, including NOPL. Also it is always prudent in the information services world to cross-advertise. I was able to make sure NOPL had a table at the event, but advertising the event in NOPL locations was difficult because while the event was technically free, you had to pay admission to enter the museum to attend it. Unfortunately, NOPL can only advertise events that are completely free and open to the public, in keeping with the spirit of free public libraries. Luckily, there was a small loophole for a certain demographic. NOMA offers, thanks to a grant, free admission to New Orleans area high school students with school IDs through the end of this year. We worked it out so that the teen programming librarians at NOPL branches could print and display these passes in teen areas, and then put the RRBE flyers next to them!
At the event, I was able to hear Dr. Nancy Dixon deliver an excellent speech on Creole literature, and help both Sheila and my NOPL coworkers do some institutional cross-promotion. For me it was an excellent opportunity my advisor gave me to polish outreach skills, which are under-rated in the information professions, especially archives!
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| Readings 'Round the Big Easy |
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| Dr. Nancy Dixon |
The first two days of the week proper were fairly in the rhythm--it is always the digitization of the items that is the most difficult and time-consuming in digital archival projects, so I plugged away at making scans and continuing to crop earlier ones, which was proving time-consuming on a computer outfitted with only Microsoft Picture Manager for cropping. While it has mostly been easy to copy the files and enter the metadata in the spreadsheet, necessary digital manipulation brought on by a project like this has been hard, owing to the actual computer's sluggishness when cropping files of the size we are dealing with. It often takes up to a minute to crop each file. Unfortunately, there is really no solution to this besides NOMA purchasing the library a new computer or seriously updating the existing one; however, the digitization project is literally the only activity performed on the computer that requires the extra horsepower, so it is hard to make the case for a new machine or better software, such as Photoshop.
On an aside, in the Art Department meeting Monday, I learned that the institution was working on applying for an IMLS grant by Nov. 30th. It would require them to have 10,000 images digitally available to users at least on the grounds of the library. There was a possibility it could be done in time without violating copyright (which is often determined by the size of the image digitally displayed--they would need to be quite tiny unless rights were obtained from the owner/artist), but they were not sure.
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