Work

Digital Preservation Policy and Documentation

2017 Jul 01 - Current
Purpose: Author NYPL's first digital preservation policy and publish supporting documentation.

Digital Archives Program

2018 Sep 01 - Current
Purpose: Manage NYPL's Digital Archives Program to stabilize born-digital content collected as part of archival acquisitions.

• Manage and maintain lab hardware, including 6 workstations, fiber-to-desktop deployments, and specialized media reading hardware.
• Publish lab <a href="https://nypl.github.io/digarch/"documentation</a> on processes and policies to centralize information, inform internal stakeholders, and share with larger digital archives community.
• Sponsor increased automation and mass transfer processes in lab workflows in response to changing composition of born-digital acquisitions and decreased value of forensic processes.

Digitization Ingest Support

2015 Dec 01 - Current
Purpose: Collaborate with image, audio, and video digitization programs to create specifications for receipt and ingest of files.

• Work with programs to test and advocate for adoption of lossless compression standards, MKV/FFV1 for video and film, FLAC/FLAC and MKA/FLAC for audio, and TIFF/ZIP and TIFF/LZW for images.
• Develop JSON Schema-based metadata serialization for audio and video digitization for automated, field-level validation.
• Develop python library, ami-tools, for conversion of legacy digitized audio and video package to current standards.
• Acting as primary stakeholder for agile development team responsible for supporting audio and video ingest software.

Digital Repository Software

2016 May 01 - 2021 Jun 30
Purpose: Selecting software to centralize management of NYPL's digital collections.

• Evaluate and audit current software, including code reads, dependency documentation, and comparison to standards such as NDSA Levels of Preservation.
• Advocate for new software implementation through interviews with peer institutions, meeting with vendors, internal presentations, and written reports.
• Changing strategies from open-source platforms (Archivematica, Fedora) to commercial platforms in response to shifting organizational strategic priorities
• Drafting functional requirements, use cases, and RFP for new software proposals, overseen by Digital Asset Management Portfolio Group.
• Evaluating proposals and designing sandbox testing criteria.

On-prem storage expansion

2015 Dec 01 - 2019 Dec 31
Purpose: Expand NYPL's capacity to transfer and store 5+ petabytes of files created by digitization and born-digital collection programs.

• Evaluate tenders from 10+ storage vendors.
• Design requirements for fiber-to-desktop deployment and provide on-site support.
• Support intermediate transfer projects with scripting.

LIS655 Digital Preservation and CUration

2017 Aug 01 - Current
Purpose: Introduce students to the management of digitized and born-digital collections from acquisiton to access.

• Create and update syllabus to respond to student requests and field developments, such as time-based media conservation and IIIF.
• Develop live-coding exercises to introduce command-line tools.
• Lead optional workshops on using Python and ffmpeg with digital collections.
• Flip classroom by creating asynchronous lecture videos and more interactive Zoom sessions in response to COVID-19.

ETDplus

2014 Nov 01 - 2016 Dec 31
Purpose: To create documentation, workshops, and software for students and staff managing complex electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).

• Conduct interviews with students and staff on ETD creation and management.
• Design, coordinate IRB approval, administer, and analyze results of student and staff surveys at 8 universities.
• Schedule and manage regular project meetings for the staff, steering committee, and advisory committee.
• Document exemplar software for grant application.

IT

2012 Nov 01 - Current
Purpose: To create and maintain policies, procedures, and tools that scale with the demands of Educopia and its affiliated communities: the MetaArchive Cooperative, the Library Publishing Coaltion, and the BitCurator Consortium.

• Draft information architecture and implement designs for new websites using Drupal 7 and maintain current websites in Drupal 6, Drupal 7, WordPress 3, and MediaWiki 2.
• Document current services and make recommendations to fill gaps or deprecate outdated technology.
• Select and implement a customer relationship management system to centralize the management of Educopia contacts across communities, research projects, and events.
• Draft a records management framework to allow flexible practices within communities while maintaining legibility between them.

Nexus

2013 Nov 01 - 2015 Feb 13
Purpose: To document the state of library leadership training programs in the US

• Analyze geographic distribution of leadership programs.
• Design schema and collect program data for a dataset of over 90 leadership programs.
• Coordinate two all-project meetings at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC.
• Schedule and record regular project meetings.

Chronicles

2012 Nov 01 - 2014 Sep 30
Purpose: To document strategies to preserve digitized and born-digital newspapers, to create curation lightweight tools, and to test ingest and dissemination processes of 3 distributed digital preservation systems.

• Document the usage of bagit-python and bagger.
• Contribute to drafts of the Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness and perform final editing and layout for publication.
• Coordinate a two-pronged international review of the Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness by deploying a CommentPress site and distributing PDFs via email.
• Schedule and record regular project meetings.

Lifecycle Management of ETDs

2012 Nov 01 - 2014 Apr 30
Purpose: To create documentation, workshops, and software for staff managing electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).

• Design pre- and post-workshop surveys to evaluate the effectiveness of training.
• Coordinate multi-stage review process of the Guidance Documents for ETD Lifecycle Management through campus brown bags, the project advisory committee, and a public review period.
• Schedule and record regular project meetings.

ICONC

2013 Nov 01 - 2014 Mar 01
Purpose: To document the extent of collaboration in grant-funded digital preservation projects in the US.

• Collaborate on schema design and data collection for over 300 projects representing more than 2000 total organizations.

Hidden Connections

2013 Jul 26 - Current
Purpose: To describe the American Museum of Natural History Library's archives of expeditions using EAD and EAC-CPF to reconnect objects across the museums.

• Create an Excel workform to collect EAC-CPF data and VBA script to transform completed workforms into XML.
• Contribute to the evaluation and selection of an archival data management system.

DPOE 2014 Survey Analysis

2015 Jan 12 - Current
Purpose: To understand digital preservation training needs based on a survey conducted by the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education program in the summer of 2014.

• Conduct multivariate analysis on the responses using R and collaborate with DPOE staff on the interpretation of the results. (in progress)

OPF 20142-015 Survey Analysis

2015 Jan 23 - Current
Purpose: To analyze digital preservation software usage based on a survey conducted by the Open Preservation Foundation between November 2014 and January 2015.

• Conduct multivariate analysis on the responses using R and collaborate with OPF staff on the interpretation of the results. (in progress)

TRAC audit

2012 Jun 23 - 2012 Aug 23
Purpose: To certify the processes of an operating digital repository against the standards of ISO 14721.

• Review all documentation related to the operation of the repository and compare it to the TRAC and ISO 16363 standards for later verification with on site visits.

Commercial Digital Preservation Systems Analysis

2012 Jun 23 - 2012 Aug 23
Purpose: To review the operation of the two most prominent digital preservation systems, Ex Libris Rosetta and Tessella Preservica.

• Conduct in depth research for all publicly available resources on the history and operation of both systems.
• Interview members of the Tessella team for further information.

Slave Voyages Data Management Plan

2013 Mar 23 - 2013 Jul 06
Purpose: To create a customized data management plan template for adaptation on future projects.

• Test available data management plan tools, including DMPOnline and DMPTool.
• Research the legal status of intellectual property rights for databases.

Marianna Shreeve Islamic Manuscript Archive

2013 Mar 23 - 2013 Jul 06
Purpose: To preserve the records and notes of one of the foremost scholars on Islamic manuscripts.

• Digitize notes relating to over 100 manuscripts.
• Optimize, document, and train others in the digitization workflow.

Tanzanian Contemporary Music Digitization

2012 Oct 23 - 2013 Jun 01
Purpose: To increase accessibility and preservability of an extensive research collection of Tanzanian music.

• Digitize a collection of Tanzanian popular music from cassette to Broadcast Wave masters and MP3 access copies.
• Model metadata for a planned preservation and access system.

Turkish Divans at UM Libraries

2012 Nov 03 - 2013 May 03
Purpose: To catalog University of Michigan's Turkish collections.

• Copy-catalog Turkish language materials in MARC.

University of Michigan Athletics Museum

2012 Oct 01 - 2013 May 03
Purpose: To review the operation of the two most prominent digital preservation systems, Ex Libris Rosetta and Tessella Preservica.

• Design an exhibit on Tom Harmon for the Krisler Center.
• Document procedures for designing future exhibits.
• Recommend strategies to increase interplay collocated interactive screens.

Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan

2011 Sep 03 - 2012 Apr 17
Purpose: To catalog and thereby increase access to University of Michigan's extensive Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish manuscript collection.

• Perform codicological examination of Ottoman Turkish Manuscripts from the Sultan Abdulhamid collection.