...
- Lee, a professor at Oxford
- Found an incomplete citation for an 1845 document involving Mary and John Smith in a book published in 1968, which indicates this material is held by your institution. Does not know the precise nature of the document or which repository in your institution might hold it, and the collection name does not precisely match any of your institution's holdings.
- Would like a copy of this specific document, as well as the current, correct citation.
- Residing overseas, Lee cannot visit your institution, and would prefer to search for and access this material online if possible.
Visiting Fellow
- Kate, 38, professor in Comparative Literature
- Kate will be in town for 3 months, during which time she will be conducting research at a few different libraries and museums.
- Already has over 100 boxes of archival material identified from finding aids that she plans to request, and would prefer to submit those requests in bulk prior to her visit.
- Plans to photograph everything she finds related to her current research project. Kate has developed a system of keeping track of her photographs with the help of a spreadsheet, which she uses later to sort each file into directories with meaningful names via a Python script that she wrote a few years back. Would like to have a better way to connect this information to the source metadata, possibly by using the barcodes she often finds on archival boxes, but hasn’t had the time to work such a process out.
- Kate prefers to *not* use OPACs, finding aid websites, digital libraries, etc. She prefers working with raw metadata. She used to work at an institution that had a Digital Humanities center, and while working closely with that department on a grant project, she picked up tricks and tools that have helped her expand her research methodologies (and not to trust the indexes provided by digital libraries, etc.).
- Kate’s also kicking around the idea for a new project right now that will explore cultural heritage metadata as text. She loves the bulk metadata exports that she has found from some libraries, but was dismayed to find out what’s missing from these records – for one example, there’s no information about the catalogers who worked on these records. Since she makes it a habit to meet and talk with public and technical services staff whenever she's doing research, she’s learned that this metadata exists elsewhere. She’s glad to know that cataloger information exists in a lot of finding aids, for instance, but she hasn't had any luck yet in getting bulk downloads of finding aids from any institutions where she’s conducted research since conceiving of this project.
- Kate dislikes (but occasionally enjoys) finding the dead end of a black box; having to start with a black box (i.e. the user interface provided by the library) in the first place; being unsure if there’s more metadata available that might assist her research.
Academic Library/Special Collections Personas (added by Matt).
...