[Ed. Note: over the course of the Mellon initiative, I plan to present “weeks in the life” to document the kinds of work we’re doing and how that work shifts over time.]
I’ve been in my position almost six months, so it’s high time for another look at a “week in the life” of the Mellon initiative. I chose to feature the week of January 14-18 because it marked an important transition: one of our faculty projects reached its official end, and we started to shift our focus to the next one. Read on for a look at the activities of that exciting week.
Monday
I’ve got a busy week ahead, so I hit the ground running by preparing a presentation for a mid-morning meeting of the University Library Committee. I attend the meeting to announce the launch of The March and encourage the members (a mix of librarians and professors) to share the project with their students and contacts. Then it’s back to my desk to work on a PowerPoint that’s near and dear to my heart: a slideshow with individual thank-yous to the members of The March‘s project team. The project officially ends on Friday afternoon, and I want to be ready to celebrate and thank my team.
In the early afternoon, I work on a visual aid for explaining the pros and cons of self-hosting a project versus hosting it on official Libraries servers. Later in the week, I’ll be facilitating a meeting where we’ll need a Faculty Fellow to choose how she wants her project hosted, and I’m hoping this will help.
I end the day with three hours of work on the final report for The March. Reporting takes a lot of time: I gather data, write it up, and then revise, revise, and revise some more to make my explanations as clear and concise as possible. Nobody wants to slog through a long report, so my goal is to keep this one brief but informative.
Tuesday
Today I’m giving my graduate employees some new projects to work on, so I start off prepping materials for them. Over the coming weeks, they’ll be building me a suite of demo projects that I can use to illustrate different platforms and technologies when helping faculty make choices about their own projects. Tom and Liam seem enthusiastic to build these projects, so I give them the materials they need and then head into a meeting with Digital Scholarship Services staff. Weekly meetings with DSS help me keep an eye on the most important parts of the Mellon projects without needing to bring whole project teams together. I’m so grateful that they give me an hour of their time for this purpose every week!
The rest of the day is dedicated to The March. There’s still plenty of final documentation left to produce, and I need to weigh in on a discussion of some copyright issues pertaining to the project. The March is definitely in the home stretch, and I’m pushing to get my reports done.
Wednesday
Today is a big day for promotions for The March. First thing in the morning, Around the O (the campus newspaper) sends a weekly e-mail of its major articles to the campus and local communities, and a feature on The March by Jason Stone gets top billing. I start watching Google Analytics closely; I think we’re about to see a big spike in visitors, but time will tell. I prepare a presentation for the Libraries all-staff meeting and spend the rest of the morning there.
After lunch, I focus on preparing for an upcoming meeting with a Faculty Fellow by tidying up her project’s Gantt chart. Some tasks have been completed since I last checked the chart, and a few need to be added or moved around. I love the logic puzzle a Gantt chart poses, but it always takes me a few hours to do a big cleanup like this. Mid-afternoon I get a wonderful surprise: the posters and bookmarks I ordered to promote The March have arrived! Mandi Garcia, the Libraries’ Communications Manager, designed some beautiful things for this project, so I take some time to collate and distribute them.
Thursday
The moment of truth has come: how many visitors did The March get after yesterday’s big promotional push? I check Google Analytics and report the good news to the Faculty Fellow and project sponsors. Then I charge into an intense couple of hours of prep for two big meetings coming up in the afternoon.
First up is a team meeting with one of the Faculty Fellows. Now that The March is ending, we are shifting our focus to her project, and a bunch of team members have questions for her about what she wants to do and how she wants to do it. I come with a packed agenda, and miraculously, we get through all the important stuff. I then go straight into a two-hour block of interviews for next year’s Mellon Faculty Fellowships. These are the last of the candidates we’ll interview this year, and I want to make sure the selection committee gets the information it needs to make a decision. Unfortunately, there’s not much time to chat after the interviews; half of us run over the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art for the opening of a big new exhibition. It’s been a long, hard day, but it’s nice to see a group of Oregon artists celebrating their show (and to grab some snacks at the reception buffet).
Friday
After a pretty frantic week, things are calming down. In the morning, I attend a workshop on card-sorting for user experience testing. I’m lucky to have colleagues working in areas that can help make the Mellon projects better, and it’s nice to have an opportunity to learn from them. At my weekly check-in with one of my supervisors, we strategize about how to wrap up the competition for next year’s Mellon Faculty Fellows. It’s exciting to see the competition winding down, and I’m hoping we can make our final choices and announce winners soon.
After lunch, I head over the DREAM Lab, the Libraries’ shiny new digital collaboration space, to set up for the closing celebration for The March. I’ve ordered catering and prepped my slideshow of thank-yous, but it seems like I’ve forgotten something. Decorations, of course! Lucky for me, the DREAM Lab is full of whiteboards, and I spend a few minutes decorating them with stats about our visitors, the number of hours we spent and assets we created, etc. When the team and guests arrive, the Faculty Fellow and I share our thanks and highlight some of the parts of the project that make us proudest. Over popcorn and cupcakes, we screen the project’s titular film and chat about what we accomplished and what comes next.
What a week! Now that I’ve recovered, I think I’ll look back on that one as a real turning point in my time here. We set out to build an ambitious project in under six months, and we did it. And now…on to the next one.