Breakthrough in Senior Thesis

This semester taught me couple of things with my senior thesis paper. Working on Time management, visiting support staffs and doing heavy research while work remotely is most significance and difficult steps to accomplish. It is an honor for me to announce that American School of the Deaf (ASD), my work place, will have upcoming opening/kickoff gala to celebrate ASD's upcoming 200th anniversary in April 2017!

American School for the Deaf's Bicentennial Celebration. 2016.
http://www.asd-1817.org/page.cfm?p=1232

This week I have posted more literature review and image contents to the appendix for my senior thesis paper.  According to my readers, they felt that I didn't provided enough information of the literature review but too much of digital project reviews. I took their advices and researched for more reading contents related to digital archive projects. In addition, I was worried about naming the professional staffs in my paper, those staff members are who i work with for ASD's upcoming gala/exhibition. After discussing with Dr. Decker about my concerns about naming these staffs, Dr. Decker proposed to mention the title positions instead the name to respect the privacy of the professional staffs.

My challenges with this paper is insufficient data of literature review and my work progress from my internship with ASD. I decided to pay another visitation to ASD. My plan for the upcoming spring break, to travel back to my worksite at ASD to collect more information for my thesis, take up some training workshop with Uni. of Conn. with their digital archive to help ASD digitize their selected collection items.

Audience Engagement with high school student

My thesis focus has changed so much since first few weeks of the semester. While working with Professor Carroll and Dr. Kitzel, they both helped me realized that my thesis were too broad and might be difficult for me research on. I decided to shift my focus from digitalizing Laurent Clerc Collection to a consortium to Audience engagement with high school students.

My thesis focus to discover a subtype pilot program as extracurricular program for high school students to participate in digitizing history archives. The goal is to show that archivists, educators, and students could work together in participatory audience engagement  in museum and archive. My part would be developing surveys, assessment and meetings with professionals.

Deaf Studies Library and Archive

National Deaf Studies Library and Archive Consortium is one of existing research models that i am currently working on. Consortium was designed to promote and develop resources for its members and to provide access to digital resources to documentation of Deaf experience, Cultures and histories for research and learning.  Same time, the National Deaf Studies Library and Archive Consortium is still in process of additional support with grants and interviewing facilities to manage the consortium.  The process of authorization of ownership, copyright and grant application is still new to me and i find it really interesting.

There are other existing models under certain groups but often issues occurs on these models (ex: Upgrade, update and/or in the transition of changing platforms). These models allowed me to do more research on which online platform is best as permanent use for digital library without any issues / concerns of changing platforms and providing more staff training. Also, to research more about range of service and collaborated projects using three-tiered infrastructure of three  type of partners (full-service hubs, Hosting hubs, and collection partners).

This research process had led me to meet several individuals who work in these field and two of them became my advisors for my thesis. I have selected Mary Beth Kiztel as my primary advisor and Joan naturale as my secondary advisor.