¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 After the first official out-of-class meeting, the group decided on the best ways to approach the project regarding our objectives, our skillsets, and the time we have at our disposal before a project draft is due on March 22nd. Jenna’s proposal was as detailed and accurate as it can be, but we agreed on making a few changes on the timeline to match it with the course schedule—in any case, these were very minor changes, so it did not affect the development of the cross-repository catalog envisioned in the first place.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Timeline for the First Month of the Project

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 March 1st – Assign a team management software to facilitate communication within the group; experiment with individual local installation of Collective Access before deciding on administrative server; develop community management tasks, such as creating social network accounts (Twitter, Facebook), obtaining relevant email lists, and setting up the necessary repositories; finish information gathering process on ZUC culture, metadata, and specific terminology.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 March 8th – Install Collective Access on the designated server.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 March 15th – Work on the data management plan (DMP) for the project and begin to look at design features for the front-end of the platform.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 March 22nd – Review milestones for the project and reevaluate the action plan from that moment on. Draft project due.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Roles & Responsibilities

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Jenna Freedman – Project Director. Not only takes on certain aspects of community management (social networking and engagement with the zine community) and project management roles, but also provides big-picture-thinking and makes sure to keep the project true to its mission. The project director is the link that holds the team together.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Lauren Kehoe – Lead Metadata Specialist, Community Manager and Documentarian. Takes advantage of her knowledge and experience in library cataloguing standards to help assess the project in terms of working with metadata. The community manager is also in charge of dealing with external and internal communication.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Aleksandr Segal – Lead Developer. Mainly responsible for building a network administrative environment for the prototype. The lead developer will learn how to set up the webserver with a Collective Access instance and how to upload the QZAP CA profile-xZINECOREx in order to modify the existing environment.  

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Marti Massana Ferre – Project Manager, Lead Designer. The person who will be in charge of keeping the project on track and ensuring everyone meets the deadlines. The Project Manager will remind the rest of the group of their targeted goals and update the objectives weekly. Once the back-end of the platform is set up, the lead designer will take part on assessing the visual aspects of the catalog and architecture of the site.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Regardless of their role, it is worth noting the willingness to collaborate in different facets of the project from all the members of the group. For example, although there has to be one webserver in particular assigned as the administrator, everyone is looking forward to working on and gaining experience with individually setting up CA.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 Mode of Correspondence & Group Meetings

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Aside from meeting in person at least once a week—the designated day being Saturday afternoon—we already created Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Drive applications to help keep everything up-to-date. However, we do not want to rely solely on the Google office suite, so we are currently looking into the best team management software according to the characteristics of this project and to our schedules. We already discarded Slack and Asana as possible alternatives since they did not seem to address our needs.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Once we decide on which software to use, we will export the information we have gathered up to this point from the Google applications into the new one.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Where the Data Will Live & Where the Site Will Go

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Collective Access is the open-source tool that we will use for this online cross-repository platform. More specifically, to build our catalog we will take advantage of xZINECOREx, the metadata standard created for the QZAP (Queer Zine Archive Project) Collective Access profile. xZINECOREx—as stated in this April, 2013 zine from QZAP—is a refined schema of the Dublin Core standard that addresses issues that apply to zines in particular.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 On a separate note, one option the team is considering to host the prototype is a Raspberry Pi as the web server.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Needs & Ways to Ask for Help

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Even though, as a group, we are aware of the steps we need to take along the way, it is also true that some questions were raised after the first meeting.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Firstly, as we already introduced above, working with Collective Access means designating one server computer with network connectivity that will enable an administrative environment for the catalog of metadata. However, in order to build up this working environment, are we entitled to server space as students at the Graduate Center, by any chance? This is something that we would really appreciate talking about during next class on Wednesday, March 1st—that would allow us to start creating our Collective Access instance as soon as possible.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Secondly, the other issues that arose involved the purpose of the platform down the line: if the catalog would ultimately feed into WorldCat, what the launch would actually look like, and the role of digitization within the interface. We already started to discuss our thoughts on this matter, but we agreed that it would make more sense to address these issues as the project starts to take shape.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Last but not least, the team also started looking into data management plans and the possibility to contact Steven Zweibel from the Graduate Center Library to help us find the best DMP for this project—either before or after the DMP Tool class on March 8th.