In my role as Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar in Library-Museum Collaboration, I sometimes feel like a translator. Museum professionals have their own special vocabulary for the concepts they use every day. So do librarians. Folks working in the digital humanities have their own lingo, and every Mellon Faculty Fellow comes from a different discipline with its own jargon. What’s a postdoc to do?
First, listen. Then translate.
Take, for instance, the word object. In museums, an object is a thing in the collection, like a painting or sculpture. For librarians (especially digitally-inclined ones), an object is a thing that can be described with metadata—so not just a painting or a sculpture, but also an image of a painting or a sculpture can be an object. This sort of object can be simple (just one image) or compound (multiple images of the same thing), and it can also be called a digital asset. But in museums, a digital asset would more likely be called a digital surrogate because it is seen as a stand-in for the real thing. Is your head spinning yet?
Then there’s a project. In the Digital Scholarship Center here at UO Libraries, a project is a series of clearly defined tasks that takes place within a limited timeframe and that has a concrete outcome—like a digital exhibition. For the Mellon Faculty Fellows, their digital exhibitions are just part of much larger research projects that can span years. It’s a lot easier to set goals and timelines for a project when everyone in the room agrees on what the project is!
As I find my place in this network of curators, collection managers, librarians, developers, and professors, I find myself doing a lot of translating of words and ideas across disciplines. It can be frustrating when communications get tangled, but I think we are all slowly learning how to speak our own language of collaboration.