It’s been a busy month in the Mellon initiative. Coming into December, it was clear we were in for a wild ride. Applications for next year’s Mellon Faculty Fellowships were due at the beginning of the month, and their arrival kicked off a review process that will last for several more weeks. These are also the last few weeks before we launch the product of one of this year’s Mellon Faculty Fellowships, a digital exhibition project led by Professor David Frank.
David’s digital exhibition is about The March, a documentary film about the 1963 March on Washington by UO alumnus James Blue. James Blue is a big deal here at UO; Blue’s personal papers reside in Special Collections and University Archives, and a research interest group led by Richard Herskowitz (Curator of Media Arts, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art) studies and presents James Blue’s life and work over at the James Blue Project.
The project team has spent much of the last four months plugging away at this digital exhibition, and in the last few weeks we’ve made a big push toward the finish line. David reorganized and condensed his content from 18 main chunks down to 10, and we reorganized his site’s layout and navigation to match. My two graduate employees, Tom Fischer and Liam Maher, diligently processed videos and transcripts, created metadata, and added their own research and writing to the site. Our colleagues in Library Technology Services have been helping improve the site’s accessibility and fixing things when they break (it seems like everything has broken at least once!). Our collaborators in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art have helped us secure reproduction permissions from the Blue family and connected us with the local NAACP chapter, who expressed an interest in screening The March as part of their MLK Day programming. I’m really excited to share this project with you when it rolls out in a few weeks.
In the meantime, I’ll share a chart that shows what the ramp-up to a digital project launch looks like from a project manager’s point of view. Here’s a breakdown of how I’ve spent my time in the last three months:
The yellow “Projects” category–representing time I spend working directly on a Faculty Fellow’s project–has expanded from 25% of my time in October to 55% of my time in December. I have had to sacrifice my time for admin and research (poor old research!) so that I can move David’s project from a draft to a finished, polished product. I think this will pay off when the project launches, and I hope to make up some of my research time in the winter quarter, when things shouldn’t be so busy.
Stay tuned for the launch of the first digital exhibition of the Mellon initiative in a few weeks!