"I’ve been asked to
share our experience in training and supervising our Digitization Assistant at
Randall House this summer in case it would be helpful to others.
In January it was
suggested that I (as Co-ordinator on the Passage Project at The Wolfville Historical
Society) apply for a grant from Young Canada Works for an assistant to help
with our digitization work. The application process was challenging but it
included thinking through the job. What would the students work be? What
training would he need? How would he be supervised? Was it possible to monitor
his work? How would results be measured? It also asked for a timeline – what was
planned for the first week, second and so on. These questions which I had to
think about early on gave me a framework for the work period as it played out
later.
These are the tasks I
had in mind and each of these had a training component:
1. Scanning
photographs from our archives.
2. Photographing
artifacts and uploading/attaching these to the CA entries.
3. Doing
basic entries from old cataloguing records (yes, we still had a backlog of
these to do)
4. Doing new
entries for items not catalogued previously (new accessions or undocumented
items)
5. Doing
research to fill in gaps and enrich the entries with more information.
6. Using social
media (Facebook) posts to promote our activities at the museum.
7. Helping
with other museum functions as might be required.
The first two weeks I knew would require considerable training time on my part and on the part of our curator (our one paid employee apart from summer students) who would be there daily and supervising when I wasn’t able to be on site.
Our student was shown around the museum,
introduced to his work space, equipment, research resources and our various
storage locations. He was given an introduction to Chenhall and the concept of
controlled language and introduced to the Collective Access (CA) Program with
an explanation of the various fields. Scanning was the easiest task to start
with so we began with that. He was shown how to use the scanner, what settings to
use and why. He was shown how to file
the scans (and later the digital photographs) and how to upload them to an
entry. He was made an administrator of
our Facebook page so he could make posts. I had arranged a separate id and password for him so that his entries
and edits in CA could be identified and all his work was kept in a separate
folder on the Passage laptop. This organizational part was useful for
monitoring and measuring his work. Also the Collective Access Program logs were
helpful in seeing what work he did each day or month.
The curator and I met early
on and discussed our respective roles. The assistant had to know who was in
charge of what. My concern was that work was done accurately and that the student
always had work to do; what was done at any particular time wasn’t as much a
concern for me. The curator’s priorities had more to do with what items she
felt were important at the time and how he could help with her schedule of work.
So our instructions to the student were that if the curator had tasks she
wanted him to complete on any day that should have priority but if there was
nothing on her list he would work on work I had waiting for him. He always had
a box of photographs to scan and attach and a list of research questions to
tackle. We agreed also that any corrections to be made which I spotted also had
priority so these would not be forgotten.
Our
curator instructed the student on how to handle
artifacts appropriately and showed him how we photograph them. He also saw how
and where items were stored so he could add these locations to entries. He was
introduced to our files of paper records and shown how to make a new CA entry
from these and also how to enter a new acquisition from information given by
the curator.
 |
| Sam at work |
I went carefully over the work he had done to catch errors early so they wouldn’t be repeated for the whole summer. Thanks
to the web-based CA program I could do most of this tracking from home. There
was a lot of information for him to digest and I found that he had forgotten some
of what I had told him in our first sessions so there was need for a review at
this point. This level of attention might be more difficult if our site
depended only on volunteers but it was time consuming mostly in the first few
weeks and it did pay off in the quality of results.
The
schedule of work after this initial phase was not fixed. It varied from day to
day. He had some latitude to choose what he did unless the curator or I had
particular tasks for him. If it was not a good day for photography he could
scan photos or do research. He was also asked on occasion to fill in doing
tours of the house when our other student helpers weren’t available (he was
taught to do this by the student who gave the tours), or help with other activities
such as helping with our Canada Day fundraiser or selling a WHS publication and
tickets to a fund raiser event at the farm market. For him these other tasks
which came up from time to time were welcome breaks from what could be tedious
computer work.
By mid-way in July he
was able to work independently but nevertheless through the summer I held short
sessions regularly to go over issues that I had found and he kept a Word file
of problems to ask me about when I came in.
Our assistant
accomplished an amazing amount of work over the 14 weeks he spent with us. He made
588 scans (this number includes some back views), he took at least 565 digital photographs
of artefacts, he entered (or enriched with added information) 197 records and
35 entities doing research to fill in gaps -for example information on
photographers and genealogies of subjects or related entities.
At the end of the
summer our student assistant expressed satisfaction with his work experience
and we were able to tell him how pleased we were with what he accomplished. I
believe that the training he had from us at the beginning and the monitoring we
did through the work period made a big difference to this mutual satisfaction."
Given the number of questions I've gotten about summer staff and the issues I noticed at some sites this season, I hope that everyone will look at this as their example of how to do things right.
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