Supervising Student Workers: Summer Blog Roundup

My duties in the Davidson College Archives & Special Collections include supervising student workers, and this summer we had a bevy of them – five total! I’ve been in supervisory roles before – I was in charge of an office as an undergrad, and I had an intern work under me for a summer when I served as the archivist of the Nichols House Museum. However, this summer was my first experience with student workers in an academic library/ archives setting, and my first time supervising so many at once.

All in all, I think the summer ended up being incredibly productive, and our student workers were all amazing! I learned a lot by working with them this summer – it was challenging (in a good way) for me to train a new corps of students, and although I tried to balance out work I knew would most likely be tedious (scanning for hours) with some more exciting or creative projects, I’m aware that some of the tasks might not have been enjoyable. However, these five women handled every assignment with good grace, and I enjoyed getting to know all of them (as did the rest of the archives staff!). All of our students did some digitization work (primarily scanning, uploading, and entering metadata for student publications), although each had a variety of projects and assignments.

Here’s a roundup of the blogs the students wrote to summarize their experiences:

Monica Nelson (class of 2015) –  My Role as a Student Assistant for the Davidson Archives: A Glimpse into Past Projects

Meredith Pintler (class of 2016) – Behind the Scenes: E.H. Little Library in the Summer

Ellyson Glance (class of 2016) – A Summer of Scripts ‘N Pranks

Emma Kenney (class of 2015) – My Final Week as a Student Assistant

Vera Shulman (class of 2015) – A Summer of Scanning, Editing, Uploading, and Researching

Takeaways from Data Driven – Digital Humanities in the Library Conference

Note: this post was originally posted on Davidson College’s Archives & Special Collections blog, and then featured in dh+lib Review‘s “Data Driven Conference Wrap-Up” post, which you can read here.

This past weekend, Jan, Craig, and I attended (and presented at) Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library in Charleston, South Carolina. Similarly to when several team members attended the Society of North Carolina Archivists annual conference a few months ago, I thought it would be interesting to compare what the three of us thought of the conference. We each attended a different workshop, although we ended up in many of the same sessions over the course of the weekend.

We each attended a different workshop, although we ended up in many of the same sessions over the course of the weekend.

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Takeaways from SNCA

Note: this post was originally posted on Davidson College’s Archives & Special Collections blog. I also wrote about my experience at SNCA 2014 in my Day of DH 2014 blog.

Professional development is integral to all of the library staff here at Davidson College, so with that in mind, the Discovery Systems team sent three of its members to the Society of North Carolina Archivists (SNCA) annual conference last week – myself, Jan Blodgett, and Susan Kerr. While we all often attend meetings, conferences, and other trainings, we usually reserve our discussion of takeways, thoughts, and interesting ideas to in-person weekly departmental meetings. We thought that my first SNCA meeting would be a great opportunity to compare and contrast what the Davidson attendees got out of the meeting. So, first up: my takeaways!

To start off the morning, Jan moderated the “Publishing and Managing Digital Collections without CONTENTdm” session, which I presented at. The session was a great opportunity to talk about our ongoing development and roll-out of our institutional repository, as well as to hear about how two other institutions are dealing with increasingly larger and larger digital collections.

Moderator and presenters at the “Publishing and Managing Digital Collections without CONTENTdm” session. From left to right: Jan Blodgett, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Chelcie Rowell (Wake Forest University), and Molly Bragg (Duke University). Photo via Craig Fansler (Wake Forest University); see his post on SNCA here. Molly Bragg also wrote a post about this session – read that here.
Moderator and presenters at the “Publishing and Managing Digital Collections without CONTENTdm” session. From left to right: Jan Blodgett, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Chelcie Rowell (Wake Forest University), and Molly Bragg (Duke University). Photo via Craig Fansler (Wake Forest University); see his post on SNCA here. Molly Bragg also wrote a post about this session – read that here.

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A Week in the Life of an Archivist

Note: this post originally appeared in Davidson College’s Archives & Special Collections blog.

Astute readers may have noticed a new name join Jan (the College Archivist and Records Management Coordinator) and Sharon (the Special Collections Outreach Librarian) here on Around the D – mine, as a matter of fact! I joined the staff of E.H. Little Library as the Associate Archivist back in October, and inspired by my old graduate school colleague Stephanie Bennett‘s recent post on what archival processing is all about, I decided to write about what I do on a day-to-day basis. So, notes and highlights on what each day of the first week of classes for the Spring 2014 semester held for the Associate Archivist of Davidson College:

MONDAY (January 13)

Generally, the first thing I do when I get into the office each morning is make a cup of tea and catch up with my inbox. On Monday mornings, there’s usually several dozen unread emails – in part because I subscribe to an assortment of professional listservs.

Post-email-checking, I updated the Archives & Special Collections Twitter, and then went to a Discovery Systems departmental meeting on student workers (possible projects, how many summer students, etc.). I spent the rest of the morning preparing for a class visit to the archives later in the day (including selecting documents and setting up their display with Jan), and working on the Around the D entry to post on Wednesday morning. Sharon and I nailed down a few details related the illumination live demonstration event (set for January 28th, from 11 AM to 12 PM).

After taking a late lunch (1:30 PM to 2:30 PM is my standard), I drafted a short news blurb related to the blog topic for the library’s homepage and updated the Archives & Special Collections Facebook. Then Jan and I hosted the first archives class visit of the semester, Dr. Anelise Shrout‘s HIS 458: American Environments to 1893.

HIS 548 students checking out campus maps.
HIS 548 students checking out campus maps.

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