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.

Timeline for the First Month of the Project

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.

March 8th – Install Collective Access on the designated server.

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.

March 22nd – Review milestones for the project and reevaluate the action plan from that moment on. Draft project due.

Roles & Responsibilities

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

Mode of Correspondence & Group Meetings

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.

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.

Where the Data Will Live & Where the Site Will Go

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.

On a separate note, one option the team is considering to host the prototype is a Raspberry Pi as the web server.

Needs & Ways to Ask for Help

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been given the title of “Documentarian Lady” which will mean a few things…

Officially, I am taking on the role of Lead Metadata Specialist (burgeoning professional interest) and a bit of the Community Manager and Documentarian role originally outlined by Jenna in her proposal. However, after our first out-of-class meeting on Saturday, I also volunteered to take on the initial task of evaluating project management software and will be doing a closer look at providing guidance on a data management plan. More about this will be shared on our group blog post, but we will be collectively deciding on Wednesday on what program to use in order to keep us all on track. The immediate contenders are Trello, as recommended by the DiRT Directory and Taiga as found through an OpenSource.com article. I’m also working on a Google Site.

Although Alex has been designated as Lead Developer, we did discuss that each of us would like to gain experience with building the catalog and Alex has already disclosed that his programming experience is very basic (however, more than the rest of us). I find this component of the project to be most daunting, but I am glad to have the support of my fellow group members in this undertaking. We discussed our plan for reaching out to various parties such as course instructor, digital fellows, Jenna’s cohort of contacts, etc. should our technical know-how be limited.

So far, I am impressed by the group’s commitment to and excitement about the project. We already have a plan for meeting most Saturdays during the semester and have worked out some of the deadlines for making progress on the project (of course, these will be tweaked as necessary). We’ve been contributing to a GoogleDoc so far where our meeting notes are currently living. It has been interesting to be part of the early stages of a project when roles need to be designed and expectations set.

In the fall, I had hoped that Jenna would propose a project around her work with Zines and was very happy when that hope was realized. I found all the project proposals to be interesting, but this project has the most professional resonance with me. I think that building this catalog will strengthen my technical skills as a librarian and I will learn about various DH tools and project components for use in future collaborative projects. Jenna’s openness and willingness to take others’ ideas into account is really inspiring and I I feel strongly that our group will be able to make progress with this project and have a working prototype to debut in May.