David Gwynn

Just turned in my last paper for my last class in my last semester of library school.

So, ummm, what do I do now?

My husband brings me the coolest stuff. Today it was these newspapers from the days surrounding the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California–just in time for the twentieth anniversary. They now get to live in my private archive along with the video coverage I scored on three VHS tapes I picked up in a Mission District thrift store several years ago.

I ran across this oddity from thirty years ago while scanning things for work yesterday, and thought it might be entertaining in light of the recent DTV switch. In 1979, the Triad got its first commercial UHF station (there had been a PBS station on channel 26 for some time, but apparently no one cared) and they placed ads showing the uninformed masses how to get the signal. Sound familiar?

I love strange old technologies like these, especially when they’re suddenly back in demand. Those UHF loop antennae are hot items again, since most TV stations in the digital era are broadcasting in the UHF band, even though their “virtual” channel numbers have not changed.

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.

So maybe someone really will hire me some day:

When the world entered the digital age, a great majority of human historical records did not immediately make the trip.

Literature, film, scientific journals, newspapers, court records, corporate documents and other material, accumulated over centuries, needed to be adapted for computer databases. Once there, it had to be arranged — along with newer, born-digital material — in a way that would let people find what they needed and keep finding it well into the future.

The people entrusted to find a place for this wealth of information are known as digital asset managers, or sometimes as digital archivists and digital preservation officers. Whatever they are called, demand for them is expanding.

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.

You know what the coolest thing about working in a library is? When you need to go to the bathroom, there’s always a good book handy.

Latest addition to the ever-growing library at our house: the complete run of Progressive Architecture from 1953 to about 1990, and the complete Architectural Record from 1950 to 1969. These gems were picked up at the Forsyth County Public Library’s recent book sale, and I assure you we paid nowhere near $3000 for either set. The purchase required us to invest in four new six-foot bookshelves, bringing the total in our library to ten, plus four additional three-foot shelves in another room, for fiction.

Excessive? You be the judge. I have too much reading to do. I have to admit that it disturbs me to find that these items are still in the library’s online catalogue, even though they are very much in my house and likely to stay there.

Speaking of libraries (which I do a lot of lately), I start work tomorrow as a volunteer on a digitization project at the Greensboro Public Library. I’ll be scanning and cataloguing newspaper microfilm on the Greensboro sit-ins and other civil rights era stories. Should be interesting, and it will make nice resume fodder as well.

I sort of got the big geeky digital preservation bug tonight, and finally converted eleven-plus years of email — half of it in the old Eudora mailbox format — into the current Apple Mail format. It was harder than it sounds; this nifty little open source uttility was a big help. But now, I can read and search messages gong back to 1996, and they’re in what I believe to be a much more sustainable format.

Of course, such a project also meant I spent a little too much time reading old email. That’s always fun.

In case your inner geek is looking for some stimulation, note that the Eudora site above includes installers for some really old versions of that now-defunct email client for your amusement.