David Gwynn

Things have been incredibly hectic lately, which doesn’t justify the lack of recent posts, but maybe at least explains it somewhat. And this one isn’t likely to be art, either. It’s just a list of some cool projects, posts, and articles  I’ve stumbled across lately:

• Wolfwalk (NC State): This one’s even better on your iPhone. It’s a georeferenced history of the N.C. State campus that also uses your phone’s GPS capabilities to provide a guided walking tour. It’s just cool.
• This is just one of those articles that makes me want to contact the author and offer to volunteer my labor just for a chance to play with  this collection. It makes me all giddy and warm just thinking about it.
• And this one, via Tame the Web, is just something I could have used earlier this week.

This is the kind of archival project that few people think about, but that will also become incredibly important over the coming years. I’ll admit that preserving the real URLs behind all those shortening services wasn’t something I’d ever really considered. It also makes me wonder about strategies for preserving database-driven websites (like this one, for example). How does an external entity manage to save both the database and the PHP files that make it function? It’s not like saving static HTML pages, although I guess saving sites as generated in that format might be the only option at this point.

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) for best adaptive reuse ever of a former McDonald’s location.

Posts have been few and far between lately, which should indicate that I’ve been rather busy over the past two months or so.

So what’s been going on?

Driving, mostly. I’ve been spending a  lot of time in my car, not just going back and forth to Pittsburgh dealing with the new house, but also to Greensboro, where I’ve been working and interning up a storm. I’m putting in one day a week at UNCG, working on a big digitization project to which I’ll introduce you shortly. I’m also working three days a week at a local museum processing an archival collection centered around a major local historical figure. The latter gig is a grant-funded named internship, which makes it more impressive, right? Either way, I’m enjoying it. It’s a good internship — one where I’m actually learning things rather than just occupying space, making coffee, or otherwise providing slave labor.

What scares me, though, is that I’m starting to think nothing of a daily commute that’s thirty miles each way. Unfortunately, Winston-Salem is not the cultural heritage epicenter of the Piedmont Triad. Given that and all the nasty budget cuts about now, my optimism about local job prospects upon graduation is somewhat lacking.

I assume Borders and Barnes & Noble will be going belly-up soon, though. Maybe my education will at least qualify me for a job at one of their liquidation sales.

One of my big, pressing projects right now is to create an EAD-compliant finding aid for the papers of the man who was chancellor at UNCG when I was an undergraduate there. I’m not sure if I’m more disturbed by the fact that my undergraduate years are now officially part of university history or by the fact that my undergraduate years are now officially part of university history and that I’m the one documenting them. Either way, it’s nothing but a really big XML file anyway, I guess.

One of my other big, pressing projects is my exciting annotated bibliography on the history of the America shopping center. No, it’s not specifically related to Library and Information Studies per se, but at least it was more fun than most of the stuff I’ve been doing the past month or so. I’ll post it here when it’s done. There are pretty pictures and a nice history essay as well.

This may be the last you hear from me for the next couple of weeks.