2021-06-22

Present: Peter Bae, Alexis Antracoli, Sara Logue, Kate Lynch, Esmé Cowles, Kim Leaman, Brenna Campbell, Annalise Berdini, Roel Munoz

Regrets: Jennifer Baxmeyer

Notes: Esmé

• Logistics (Esmé)
  • The group reviewed the Charge, and agreed to create a new Slack channel as the primary means of communication, and publish notes in Confluence.
  • Esmé will setup a notes rotation for future meetings.
• Priorities (All)
  • The group reviewed the 2021 priorities from the charge (small projects, evergreen projects, ephemera, conservation/metadata forms, and digitization/hosting MOUs). We agreed that small projects were the most urgent, and should be tackled first.
  • A number of issues were raised for small projects:
    • What constitutes a small project? Is it only the number of items, or is it impacted by other considerations like metadata, conservation, and IT development effort? When does a patron request become a project, and when does a project no longer qualify as "small"?
    • We have a high volume of patron requests, and expect that to continue into the fall. CaMS, ADAPT, Conservation, and IT have a significant amount of work that is not related to digitization. Projects are in addition to this baseline.
    • We need to establish workflows and approval processes for small projects. We want to make this as lightweight as possible, but the same issues that can cause trouble for large projects can cause trouble for even very small ones. Can we develop guidelines for anticipating issues with photography, conservation, metadata, etc? Can we at least help people know when they should consult (and who they should consult)?
    • There have been a number of grant applications circulating — and deadlines and other commitments these entail can impose a burden on staff.
    • Communication and making sure everyone represented here knows about new projects.
  • Out of scope:
    • Large projects are reviewed by DSG
    • Exhibitions are managed by EOG
• Current work (Kim and Roel)
  • We've used a number of different tools for planning and tracking projects, including Github tickets, spreadsheets, calendars, proposal forms, etc.
    • We have recently started using Airtable to track large projects and manage some of our workflows. Airtable has good support for different kinds of metadata about projects, including basic metadata (title, stakeholders, relevant dates, tagging, etc.), links to relevant documents, tasks (with their own dates, assignees, etc.).
    • Kim did a demo of what projects look like in Airtable, showing a few projects, different views, links to the Digital Studio Register, the different kinds of fields, tasks, etc.
    • Some tasks can be automated (e.g., working with Conservation to have stakeholders receive notifications when items are sent to the Studio and returned back to Conservation).
  • The metadata and functionality is very rich, but also looks like a lot of information to enter — is this only for large projects and exhibits?
    • The same kinds of functionality could be helpful for evergreens, and potentially for small projects too. Very little is required, and you can have different views that might make more sense for other project types.
  • We are often asked to estimate capacity, does this have a way to visualize that?
    • Have typically used calendars to do this, recording projects by week.
    • It would be good to take patron requests and exhibits into account so we can figure out how much capacity we really have
    • Backlogs from Mudd closure, non-digitization Conservation work, etc. are also a major factor here — makes it hard to estimate how much is available for digital projects.
    • Question isn't whether it's possible to fit something in, it's what else will be impacted if we do that.
• Next Steps:
  • Esmé: create slack channel
  • Esmé: draft next month's agenda based on the issues raised today
  • ALL: think about tools and workflows that could help with these issues
  • Sara/Peter: demos of Aeon and ILLiad for next time