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- Kate will be in town for 1 month, 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.
- Has determined that she will not have time to photograph everything, and has a small budget to fund digitization in her grant project.
- 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.
Remote Professor (Lee, Sally)
- Lee, tenured professor in the History of Science at Oxford, 50 years old. Lee is researching Julian Huxley and the environmental movement in the early 20th century.
- Lee will not be able to visit your institution, and prefers to search for and access material online.
- Wants to set up a virtual appointment with an archivist/librarian to talk about his project.
- Will pay to fund digitization of items relevant to his research.
- Has no familiarity with ArchivesSpace , and wants to be able to instantly peruse any digitized material and their relevant metadata (including citation line).
- Wants to be able to save and sort result sets, including identifiers for each resource.
- Needs permanent links to descriptive metadata.
- Needs permanent links to online resources.
- The collection includes bound volumes, which he would like to flip through in the same way as an e-book