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INF 392K Digital Archiving and Preservation, Spring 2019 Unique #27685 --Assignments
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Class participation (15% of grade): Students will be expected to read assigned readings and come to class prepared to discuss them. I have provided a set of study questions for each discussion class. We depend absolutely upon your preparation, alertness, and contribution to class discussion in order to move the class forward. Assigned readings and the sequence of lectures will be directed at supporting the process of repository building in the project, and discussion in the class will be a vital part of progress on it. Remember that the only stupid question is the one not asked: we all benefit when someone points out unclothed emperors right and left. For lab classes beginning March 28, students will be expected to participate actively. We will meet briefly on Thursdays to hear reports on the team projects, because each project will be different and you can learn from all of them by asking questions. Also for this period you need to play your part on your project team and assist other teams with advice if common problems should manifest themselves--during the active building phase of the class your input of constructive questions or substantive advice to other teams will be welcomed.

Teaching the class what your project knows (10% of grade): Students will as part of their project teamwork undertake to teach the rest of the class something they have had to master in order to complete their project: for example, how to handle a particular media format or extract intrinsic metadata from a particular file format. We will discuss possibilities for this further in class as the projects get started.

Semester project (40% of grade): The project for this spring, as for the past twelve years, will be to gain experience of digital archiving by working on real projects using (mostly) the School of Information's digital repository (https://ford.ischool.utexas.edu). This means that we will be working with several groups of actual materials to deposit in the repositories and figuring out not only how to capture them in the first place, how to structure their new home, and how to get them in, but how to preserve them over time. For each project there will be at least one "client" with whom you will work. This person will serve you as a guide and may expect you to meet the needs of his/her repository, but you will be expected to devise and suggest solutions to archiving problems as they are encountered, and to share your own thoughts with us in the class as you reflect on what you are being asked to do. Where will we get these materials? This year some of them are in possession of the iSchool, but some will come from the UT Libraries, Briscoe Center, and the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory. In many cases we will be doing things for which there is no standard practice and may be working with file types with which there is not much experience of archiving. There will be four projects.

Each project will be carried out by a team of five students, and each project will have different problems to solve. You will be assigned to a project on February 7, at the third meeting of this class. From then on, each team will be expected to be prepared to report briefly on progress at each class meeting, bringing up at least one problem (solved or unsolved) for class discussion (team members should share out this responsibility, having formal assignments for each member). Also along the way, there will be several specific deliverables that will eventually be archived:

1. An aspirational schedule of work and proposed workflow, due by February 14.
2. A formal report on management policy for the materials, due March 7 as part of your work on modeling stakeholders and workflow in DSpace.
3. A formal report on workflow steps being achieved and how the workflow may have been modified when confronted with reality, due April 11.

At the end of the project, student teams will turn in three sets of documents:

A) documentation of the collection that has been created in the repository and the preservation tasks that should be attached to that collection going forward, including all work papers used in the process of collection processing;

B) a formal report on the team project as a whole, an identifiable segment of which will be written by each student--note that the report should include final versions of items 1-3 above as well as careful description of everything you did;

C) Your final presentation slides from the last day of class. All of this material will be deposited in the repository to preserve documentation of the work.

At the end of the semester each team will be expected to give a formal presentation on their project in class (note that formal means formal: your presentation should be drawn from the formal report to the creator or custodian of the collection you are working with, who will hopefully be able to attend the final presentation). The teams will also be responsible for being sure that the client is fully aware of where to find everything.

There is an additional opportunity for displaying your work. In May the iSchool will once more be hosting a showcase of student work, and this year I am asking each project team to create a poster for it.

Grading of individual students' work for the project will be on the basis of the documentation of the project deposited in DSpace (A above), the student's portion of the team report and the quality of the team report overall (B above), the instructor's observations of students' efforts, the overall success of the project (note that if the project goes badly through no fault of the students, team members will be expected to analyze the problem in depth and craft a serious "lessons learned" document for a successor student team), and students' evaluations of their own and each others' contributions to the project.

Individual task journal (35% of grade): Each project team member will have a specific role to play ("domain expert") decided by the team itself. Project teams will be expected to meet early on and decide how to share out the tasks to be done in completing the project. Each student will be expected to keep a reflective journal of reflections on readings and project tasks as performed by him/her, on the model of the reflective process as discussed in class, and thinking about readings and other research pertinent to the project (notes on which should be included in the journal). The journaling system in Canvas will be set up by the second meeting of the class so that you can begin to use it after class. Students will keep individual journals only visible to the instructor, and each student will be expected to make at least one journal entry per week. Materials developed in the journal may where appropriate certainly find their way into the final documents.