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JLV: UMCP is dealing with furloughs and hiring freeze. The Office of Digital Collections has had a severe staff cut and now JLV is the only full time non-tech position. David Kennedy is leaving. They are using Fedora, an open source program which requires programming support that may not be available under current staffing.
SG: Hired a student to work full time during the winter session scanning glass plates negatives from a Baltimore advertising company featuring Baltimore street scenes. Will be launching PastPerfect online in the next few months, creating one search interface for approx 20 databases (currently have 20 seperate interfaces). A new exhibit is opening on Jan 28 in the Library Gallery, Photographs of James L. Amos; the exhibit will be up until March 23.
LL: Focusing on processing of Baltimore Sun Archives, including financial and labor records. Also working to build University Archives holdings in digital collections.
JJ: Banneker-Douglass Museum is affiliated with the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture. They will be celebrating their 25th anniversary and JJ is working on a documentary, "talkumentary" by April. She has interviewed former City Executive Joe Alton. BD Museum is hiring two student interns for April-June work.
AF: She has been working on the Catholic Review photo collection, pre-1982, and the Sister Corita Kent Collection.
BC: Creating metadata for Capital Improvements in Baltimore City; includes photographs and reports, features Henry Barnes, traffic czar.
MS: Working on a collection of Maryland Colonial currency, and the Erin Sulpher Collection which features WPA artists. She is developing more relationship building, please contact her if you would like to collaborate! mscott@prattlibrary.org
DE: Is conducting private research on 19th Century printing history in Baltimore. With the assitance of graduate students he has created a database of book arts professionals. He will be collaborating with MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) to build a dynamic map.
MR: They are hosting an MLK Day event featuring Congresswoman Donna Edwards (MD's first African American Congresswoman) and Ebony Strings (from Juilliard). They will be having an African American Read-In on Fab 7th, Coretta Scott King Award books. The card catalog in the Sojourner Truth Room includes a biography and literature index from anthologies; they need volunteers to enter this information into a database. They are getting a new catalog system- Polaris. There is a hiring freeze, and there is a new director for the library system.
DA: The Library should be sparred this fiscal year. They are focusing on their backlog. Expected to consolidate the photographs databases this March. Special Collections will be moving back to the pre-2003 space instead of having their "reading room" in the Library. They are working on a digitization project using external funding - the Hildenburg Project contains German-American newspapers and will eventually serve as a clearinghouse for other German-American materials. They also digitized the Betsy Bonaparte papers.