Today marks the end of my first (academic) quarter working on the Mellon initiative. Many people in the UO Libraries and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art have been working hard and collaborating generously to keep this initiative moving forward. In honor of this milestone, I would like to share some summary data on what we have accomplished so far.
1 publication in progress
My two supervisors and I are co-authoring an article about how to use strategic planning exercises to identify areas where a museum’s and a library’s missions and priorities overlap. When we know where we overlap, we can collaborate better and more clearly articulate what we contribute to a university.
8 new open-access assets (courtesy of UVA Press)
For one of this year’s faculty-led projects, I contacted the University of Virginia Press to request permission to reproduce edited transcripts of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s phone calls. Not only did UVA Press generously grant my request, but they also decided to make those documents open-access for all. You can view one of them here.
11 posts on Mellon @ UO
If you’re reading this, you already know that I blog about the day-to-day life of this collaborative initiative. I’m glad to have a platform for sharing what I learn along the way.
22+ people on project teams
Each of this year’s faculty projects is supported by a team of collaborators. They come from the UO Libraries and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and from multiple departments in each. Plenty of people who don’t officially belong to a project team offer their advice and help as well, and none of this would be possible without everyone’s generosity and good will.
90+ pages of project planning documentation
Before a faculty project can get underway, we need to plan it and make detailed records of our plans. A digital exhibition project (like the three we’re doing this year) requires at least 30 pages of planning documentation. Add to this all the other documents we produce in the course of our daily work—spreadsheets, notes, e-mails, training guides, presentations, etc.—and you’ve got a big stack of (digital) paper!
100+ meetings
Collaboration requires communication, and sometimes an e-mail just won’t do. Since I started my position in August, I have personally attended over 100 meetings relating to the Mellon initiative. It’s a lot of work to organize and prepare for these meetings, but it’s always good to sit down with my collaborators and solve problems together.
330 hours of GE labor
I have two smart and efficient graduate employees working part-time on the Mellon initiative. They bravely tackle whatever work I need them to do, whether it’s editing videos and transcripts, creating original graphics, capturing film stills, conducting research, writing, or creating metadata.
450+ scans of items in Special Collections and University Archives
The Digital Production unit in the UO Libraries is doing a ton of work to support the Mellon projects this year. When a Faculty Fellow wants to use an item from Special Collections and University Archives in a digital exhibition, they digitize that item and give us high-quality images to use online.
2,700+ pageviews on one digital exhibition in progress
This fall, we’ve been focusing on producing one digital exhibition using the WordPress platform. Over the last few months, as we have created pages, added images and text, updated menus, edited, deleted, and refreshed, we’ve racked up thousands of pageviews.
I like to share figures like these because so much of the work we do before a project launches to the public is invisible from the outside. Quantifying what we do is one way to convey that it takes a lot of clicks, scans, people-hours, meetings, documents, and digital assets to build a digital humanities project. I think sharing data like this can also help us celebrate what we’ve done so far and get excited for what lies ahead.
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