Capstone Project for the CAS DL

A few weeks ago I had a meeting with my adviser, Dr. Jerome McDonough about my plans for a queercast repository. I was hoping the idea would be good enough to use as a capstone project for my degree, a Certificate of Advanced Study in Digital Libraries. Even if it wasn't an ideal final project, I hoped to pursue this for the University Library on my own. Either way I hoped he might help me make sense of all I was trying to do. Everything about this project is big and complex. See the mess I brought to him below. This is a scribble of the stuff that was floating around in my head in a nutshell.

After my conversation with Dr. McDonough, I had the below lists . . . . ahhhhhh, this is why I'm here at GSLIS, with these amazing people. This endeavor literally seeks to create a new library brick by brick, by brick . . .

Dr. McD suggested organizing issues into the three broad categories listed below. Many more issues came up in my talk with him and that will be fodder for future posts. Here's the view at 10,000 feet:

Functional Issues:

• Selection
• Acquisition
• Description / Metadata
• Storage
• User Access / Security
• Delivery
• Preservation

Policy Issues:

• Collection Development Statement
• Rights Management
• Access Policy - (dark archive for x years; limit access to campus; to world; accessibility issues; security inside and end-user)
• Preservation Policy
• Infrastructure Planning

Sustainability Issues:

• Funding (persistent / grants)
• Content Contributer Involvement
• End User Involvement
• Management Structures
• Promotion (in-house / world)

Many of these themes overlap, such as metadata and preservation issues, but it's good to have a framework to start with. For my CAS project, Dr. McDonough suggested that I try to focus on a particular area. The most appealing to me are issues around of infrastructure, policy and sustainability.

Dr. McDonough also recommended the following faculty at GSLIS who may want to contribute to this project in the following ways:

Stephen Downie - multimedia issues
Lori Kendall - online communities
Dan Schiller - Policy
Terry Weech - collection development statements

PodCampNYC

PodCampNYC began registration in February of this year and within weeks, it was filling up. Since I listen to so many podcasts, knew that many of the queercasters I listen to would be attending. I felt that this would be the place to pitch my idea and get a sense of the community response to the idea of preserving their content.

Thankfully, you don't have to read my notes of the meeting. You can just listen to it as it was made into a podcast. Thanks to Remarkably Mark for the below report and using his show to send this content out into the world.

I'm happy to report that the community is very supportive of the idea. What an honor it was to get to meet so many of them. I'm thrilled so many want to be involved in helping to shape what this project will be.

THE REST OF THIS POST WAS TAKEN FROM REMARKABLY MARK - see the above link to visit Mark's blog.
http://remarkablymark.blogspot.com/
david vess

Remarkably Mark #62: Queer Podcasting Panel at PodcampNYC

I moderated a roundtable discussion for queercasters as part of the PodcampNYC "unconference" at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan on April 7th, 2007.

Participants:

Chef Mark Tafoya, Remarkably Mark
David Vess, Librarian, Univ. of Illinois (vess at uiuc dot edu)
Richard Bluestein, Yeast Radio
Bicycle Mark
Larry Vader, Little Fatty Cast
Chris, Somewhat Special Chris
Tim Corrimal, Orlando and Dennis, Go Rainbow Radio
Ramble Redhead
Nick McNeely, Question of the Week, IfNotNow.net
Kiki Molinari
Jeffrey Keefer
Dick Wolfley, channel125.com
Tristin Borland, Jaded City, queercasters.com
VietJohn Tran, VJNet
Bradley Traynor, Wanda Wisdom, Big Gay News
Mark Baratelli, Lady Raptastic, IMakePodcasts.com
David Buckingham & Brian Griffin, The Occasional Fag
Cheryl Merkowski, whorehole.org
Randolph Wicker


Theme Music: "Viva Remarkably Mark!" by John Ong. www.onglinepodcast.com

Voice Mail line: 1-646-797-3196
skype: remarkablepalate
remarkablepalate@gmail.com





remarkablymark.podshow.com

Remarkably Mark, podcast, podcampnyc, qpodder, queercaster, Chef Mark

The QueerCast Repository Idea

Two years ago I discovered podcasting entirely by accident. I was stuck at home with a cold and I couldn't sleep. To pass the time I decided to try to catch up on NPR programs I missed that week. I knew NPR was making some of their programs available online and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to investigate this new service. While curled up in bed with my laptop, I wandered around the iTunes Music Store. Browsing led me to a few programs that looked really unusual. They weren't produced by an organization but by individuals. I started listening. Hours went by and I was hooked. I subscribed and listened to as many as possible that evening, fascinated by what I heard - a bunch of queers talking about all kinds of things. I loved it.

I'm not a lonely person. It's fair to say I often have too many social engagements per week - far too many for a grad student to have. The community in Champaign-Urbana is filled with brilliant, amazing people so the drinks and suppers tend to go on forever around here. I also have lots of friends who live elsewhere and the magic of cell phones, email, IM and so forth make them all very close. Nevertheless, something about listening to all these recordings of people was a mesmerizing experience. It was like meeting a whole new set of friends. While the relationship is very one-sided, it doesn't matter to me, I want to hear more. What an amazing thing, real queer people talking. I have tons of queer folk in my life but this is different. I was deeply stuck by their ideas, voices, creativity, perspectives and also by their ingenuity. This group of people who, as a social minority never had a voice throughout history saw a nest of technologies available and put them to use, sending there voices out into the world. This time they weren't speaking though underground literature but though more main steam channels, coming up in iTunes and Juice along with content generated by large organizations.

Sleeping peacefully wasn't an option that night. I was excited by the content I found but I was worried. What was the future of this material? Where would the recordings of all these amazing voices end up? That was where the fantasy started for me. What if I could try to figure out a way to take advantage of all the amazing resources (human and technical infrastructure) available at UIUC Library - to help preserve all this fantastic content?