Our first major set of deliverables for Phase 1 were assembled and reviewed this week with project team partners Common Media. Staff from all three schools have been working to populate survey spreadsheets about our existing metadata and digital content: where it all lives, its current state (e.g.: published or not?), size, location, etc. After a really helpful review of the spreadsheets and discussion at our monthly F2F and then the weekly standup, we all added some more data over the course of the week to round out the overall scope of information.

We also developed and tested out a survey to help us collect user stories about digital libraries. Our goal is to ask our communities and stakeholders (staff, administrators, faculty, students, and others who use or might use our collections) to create very short “stories” that relay user behavior and desired functionality. We found a good example of how to do this by asking users to fill in the blanks: “As a <blank> I want to <blank> so I can <blank>.  Here’s how one user story might look:

“As an archivist, I want to be able to link our digitized letters to the related online finding aid so that I can help researchers access materials without having to travel from far away.

If you want to create your own user stories, please use this form: it’s short and easy and you can do as many as you like! We’d love to have your input or comments.

Next steps include:

• Gathering samples of our collections content (metadata and digital assets/objects) for analysis by Common Media.
• Continuing to collect user stories and mapping our governance documentation.
• Starting up a round technical surveys from each school to help better understand how our technology resources and environments would support any future implementation.

Feel free to contact the team with any questions!