Library Day in the Life Round 6 - Day 2

This post is written for Round 6 of the Library Day in the Life project where librarians across the world share details of their daily activities. 

Today's activities was mostly meetings with a few data related tasks in between.


I started the day with helping a colleague complete a report request for our Development office.  I reviewed the stories aired on Tell Me More during the month of December and identified which were education related stories.

Next I fixed some older catalog records that had misspellings pointed out by one of our editors.

A few years ago I spent some time working in the Information Technology department on a company-wide software development project.  I became the product owner for a person name authority database (called Hermes) for the newsroom here at NPR.  Part of being a product owner entails training folks on the tool.  I spent 20 minutes or so today answering questions from a producer and intern on the Arts Desk regarding Hermes.

Every Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon, my colleague Hannah and I meet with our contractors at Siteworx to get a status update on the implementation of the new archive database Artemis (can you see a theme with the database names?).  Today's status meeting was a little different because we were demoing to our executive sponsors the work we had done on the project over the past two weeks.  This meeting was the first time they got to see NPR data & fields within the product we are using (Collective Access).

After lunch I spent some time merging some records that weren't migrated correctly when our current archive database was implemented.  I was able to finish the listing of records (over 300) this afternoon which was exciting.  I also met with another one of my colleagues - Lauren - to review the additional records that she and I have been reviewing as part of the this data migration effort as well.  NPR's archive has over 40 years of records and the fields available and cataloging syntax has changed over those 40 years.  Therefore there are quite a few data migration related projects to get through before the next migration to the new system. In fact I found a few more queries that need to be run and the results reviewed as I went through the remaining records this afternoon.

Also this afternoon, I sat in on a demonstration from one of our digital engineers on how the audio that is broadcast is captured and split up into individual stories to be posted on NPR's website.  With the new archive database we are planning to offer preview & download audio functionality as the NPR staff are going through search results.  Part of this functionality includes actually creating digital files of our collection as well as establishing "born-digital" workflows for the archive.  This meeting this afternoon was just one step in a many-step process to understanding what actions are happening today in order to adjust them for the future workflow.