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SILS Welcomes Carolina Digital Curation Fellows
by Carolyn Hank
The 2007/2008 Carolina Digital Curation Fellows from left to right, John Blythe, Samantha Guss, Jennifer Mantooth, Lisa Gregory and Mark Swails.
Oct. 29, 2007 - As a component of the three-year, IMLS-funded project, Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr), SILS is pleased to announce the appointment of five Carolina Digital Curation Fellows.
This two-year Fellowship program supports graduate students interested in research and work in digital curation. The Carolina Digital Curation Fellows are combining coursework with a practicum assignment in a UNC at Chapel Hill academic library, archive, or data center leading to a master's degree in Information Science or Library Science.
John Blythe, a native of Chapel Hill and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumnus, came to the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) following an 18-year career in journalism that included stints as a Web editor, radio producer and newspaper reporter. His interest in digital curation and preservation grew out of an encounter with a box of old tapes made by his grandfather during a long career as a newspaperman and writer in North Carolina. John will be pursuing his MSIS, and will serve his first-year practicum with the University Library’s Documenting the American South (DocSouth) initiative.
Lisa Gregory earned her BA in English Literature from Samford University and an MA in English from the University of New Mexico (UNM), where she developed an interest in digital curation while digitizing and preserving slide images. She has worked at the Special Collections Department of the Samford University Library, at the Bunting Digital Resources Library of UNM and, more recently, at D.H. Hill Library at North Carolina State University. Lisa is pursuing an MSLS, and will serve her first practicum year with the University Library’s Digital Library at Carolina, working on a variety of projects, including the initiative to build and deploy an institutional repository.
Samantha Guss holds a BA in English from Pennsylvania State University. She was an intern on the Hemingway Letters Project, a project to collect and publish the complete correspondence of Ernest Hemingway, and recently worked on the Pennsylvania Newspaper Project to preserve and microfilm Pennsylvania's newspapers. Samantha is interested in digital preservation as it relates to the cultural record and in how digitization affects the user's experience. Samantha is pursuing an MSLS. Her first-year practicum is with the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, investigating data life cycle characteristics in the context of a social science data repository.
Jennifer Mantooth graduated from North Carolina State University with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. As a language lab coordinator for the Duke University Library System, she witnessed first hand the value of digital text and media as learning tools and the potential for future growth and application. Jennifer is currently pursuing an MSIS. For her first-year practicum, she is helping ibiblio.org to enhance the documentation and management of its online collections.
Mark Swails received his BA and MA degrees in American History from Emory University with a focus in Southern History. He first became interested in librarianship through a student job at Emory's Heilbrun Music and Media Library. This interest, combined with his work with historical documents, ultimately led him to digital curation. Mark is pursuing an MSLS, and he is working with Information Technology Services’ Teaching and Learning division for his first-year practicum. Mark will work on several projects with the overall intent of applying principles of digital curation to practical teaching and learning applications.
The goal of the Carolina Digital Curation Fellowship program is to produce high-quality information professionals prepared to work in the 21st-century environment of digital information. It offers the Fellows the unique opportunity to interact and collaborate with key international leaders in digital preservation. Dr. Helen R. Tibbo serves as Principle Investigator (PI) for the DigCCurr project, and Dr. Christopher (Cal) Lee serves as Co-PI. For more on the DigCCurr project the Fellowship program, please see: http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr/