It has been a busy start to the year at ADS, hence why I now find myself writing about what Curatorial staff did way back in the cold days of January (well that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!).
Almost annually since 2017 the CATS (Curatorial and Technical Staff) have aimed to take a full week “off timetable” at some point during the year. The purpose of this ‘CATS Week’ is to briefly get away from day-to-day tasks and spend some quality time looking at a variety of curatorial concerns, from bigger strategic issues in need of some focused thought through to smaller tasks that often get pushed to one side when other priorities rear their heads. CATS Week also aims to get us CATS out of the office, even if just to a seminar room or lecture theatre somewhere else in the university, so that we can easily chat and not get drawn back into the usual tasks that are always lurking in the background. A nice group lunch and some time spent doing something not entirely related to the usual digital preservation (see Wednesday’s activity below) also tend to feature. On the whole, not a bad way to ease back into the working year.
CATS Week 2024 ran as follows:
Monday Kick off and Appraisal Day. After some general discussion about the plan for the week we kicked the timetable off with a morning look at our existing Sensitive Data Policy and how this can be expanded to better include easy identification of sensitive content alongside the development of improved workflows, flags, and procedures. Lots of discussion focused on what exactly qualifies as ‘sensitive content’ and this was building on ongoing work being undertaken by Jenny, Teagan, and Solange, initially looking at burial datasets in ADS collections. These discussions allowed them to talk about the work they’ve already undertaken and resulted in some clarification of procedures and a general timeframe for the larger project.
In the afternoon we reconvened to look at our current metadata policy and procedures, focusing on what we consider mandatory metadata elements for all collections and data (e.g. coordinates or captions) and updating aspects of our procedures to make these clearer and easier to check.
Tuesday ‘Big Table‘. Tuesday’s focus was on the nuts and bolts of ADS digital preservation, looking at the way we deal with files from ingest through to dissemination in order to create a master reference ‘big table’. The initial idea was to ‘group brainstorm’ each process by working from ingest file formats through normalisation procedures, checking, and metadata requirements but this proved far from ideal as an engaging group activity! A large chunk of time was spent discussing the existing Data Types that we use to broadly classify data in collections and we eventually ended up doing a group sprint on a large Google Sheet which will now form the basis for further work. After a fairly mentally challenging day we spent a final hour or so preparing files for the following day’s off-site activity.
Wednesday 3D Printing day. CATS convened at 10:00 on Wednesday at the university’s main campus Library to go try our hands at 3D printing in the relatively-new YorCreate makerspace. The day was partly taken up with a morning induction session for ADS staff followed, after lunch, by the opportunity to print the 3D objects we had prepared the previous day. Valeria has written a blog post (to be published later this week) solely on what we did that day so I’ll simply direct you to that rather than steal her thunder. Needless to say we had a very productive day experiencing the highs and occasional lows (e.g. my three-hours-in-then-failed ‘Terme Boxer’) of 3D printing.
Thursday Collections Day. Thursday was spent looking at ADS collections and the existing limitations to how we present them with a view to working out how to overcome these. A major focus was on structural – e.g. “parent-child” – relationships but others were also considered, such as those between same-site collections from different creators or times.
We also spent some time considering user guidance and help for specific formats and aspects of the ADS website, looking at where this currently exists, and how it’s displayed. As work is currently being undertaken on the new website collection templates (see this ADS blog post from January ) this seemed like a good opportunity to look at possible improvements that could be easily included.
Friday. Traditionally CATS week Friday is the day where “anything else” gets dealt with: old ‘dysfunctional’ collections, metadata cleaning, tweaks to interfaces, generally anything that’s been pushed down the list of priorities over the year. Some of us restructured some older collections to fit more with current standards while others fixed interface issues, cleaned metadata database tables, or continued work from previous sessions in CATS week. Notes were tidied up, actions were collated, and we wound down 2024’s CATS Week with a healthy list of completed tasks alongside items to be taken forward throughout the remainder of the year..
