Since 2017, I have been the Project Manager for the Duchamp Research Portal. The Duchamp Research Portal is an online platform that aggregates a selection of digitized archival holdings and museum collections at three partner institutions to make a significant portion of primary source materials related to Marcel Duchamp accessible and discoverable through a single interface. It launched on January 24, 2022. I oversee or participate in almost all aspects of the project including but not limited to: developing the work plan, creating metadata, managing the digitization process, gathering feedback, tracking issues in GitHub, writing project documentation, performing outreach, and tracking the budget. Read about my experience creating the DRP.
My favorite part of my job is doing reference! I love helping people find the answers to their questions. I strive to make our resources as discoverable and usable as possible. Creating LibGuides is one way to do that.
I initiated and currently lead the first collaborative web archiving project for the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL). To garner interest in the project, I helped to develop a virtual program titled Save All the Internet: Web Archiving Tools and Tips. I administer PACSCL’s Archive-It subscription, which has since enabled staff from over 14 organizations to start using the platform at no cost to them. In addition, I have organized project meetings, coordinated the development of metadata guidelines, and led discussions about best practices and tips for web archiving, while learning to use Archive-It myself along the way. Archived web pages can be viewed through the Archive-It platform (link opens in a new tab).
In 2016, I migrated the Philadelphia Museum of Art's archival description information from a Microsoft Access database to ArchivesSpace. Since the migration, I have been iteratively working to improve and maintain our instance of ArchivesSpace. This has included creating internal documentation and a style guide, standardizing data, and auditing finding aids for harmful language. Read more about the museum's ethical cataloging work(link opens in a new tab).
From 2017-2018, I participated in the National Digital Stewardship Residency in Art Information (NDSR Art) project at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a host mentor for our NDSR Art resident, Elise Tanner. “Planning for Time-Based Media Artwork Preservation” was a year-long initiative to research the collecting, care, and conservation needs of the museum’s time-based media art (TBMA) collection. In this article, we describe the work of establishing digital storage space, creating and implementing a disk-imaging workflow for the artworks’ born-digital components, and developing more robust collections records. Ultimately, the project produced a foundation of knowledge and documentation to inform museum staff about the best practices and standards necessary to build an infrastructure that fully supports the unique preservation needs of TBMA.
In 2018, the Philadelphia Museum of Art launched its first online scholarly publication examining the collection of John G. Johnson. The publication was accompanied by the digitized papers of Johnson and other museum records related to his collection. It represented the first time the museum made large bodies of primary source material available online. I oversaw all aspects of the creating this digital resource, from digitization to metadata creation to rights research.
In 2019, I curated a small exhibition of archival material related to the Duchamp family of artists that complemented The Duchamp Family exhibition in the main building, which was also on view at the same time.