Gettin' Organized

I feel like I'm starting to get into a routine with this internship!  My site supervisor and I just had our second Skype meeting.  Our weekly slot keeps getting moved earlier and earlier on my Saturday morning (her Friday afternoon) and as much as setting an alarm for Saturday is a bit of a bummer, I'm glad to have the time to really dive into my questions.  We met for an hour and 20 minutes this week and most of the time was spent going through a list of a million questions related to web archiving that I had compiled since our last meeting.

I didn't really think about the archiving aspect of this internship when I applied for it since I was more interested in the video development side of things, but getting a crash course in web archiving is proving to be a pretty awesome bonus.  I don't really see myself being an archivalist in the future (and I haven't taken any classes in it), so the exposure is nice and I like learning something new even if it wasn't on my radar!

This past week, I watched a 50min. training video and went through a huge powerpoint presentation on my own, testing out the WAS service and taking notes as I went.  I got a really good feel for what WAS is doing and, after asking my site supervisor all of my questions, I really feel like I have a good grasp of what's going on at WAS.  I realize this wasn't a particularly formal orientation, but the format worked well and allowed me to explore on my own.  In the long-run, I feel like this helped with my understanding because I had time to experiment and try things out instead of simply listening to a presentation.

My internship is fairly loose in terms of guidance at the moment.  My site supervisor knows she wants better instructional videos on the website, but doesn't yet have specific ideas about what videos.  At this point in the planning process, we are working together to figure out what videos I should make.  I suggested we poll the current WAS customers to find out what they are interested in seeing and she liked that idea.  Over the next week, she is going to ask around her office to find out what the best way to approach customers might be (open-ended question, priority list, guided survey?).  We want to have a useful list and she is a bit concerned that customers will either provide really broad answers or will just want videos about everything (not our goal).

In the meantime, I am continuing to explore the videos that already exist and am going to start experimenting with Camtasia, the screen-capture software that my site supervisor recommended.  We haven't quite solved the network issue that came up last week so I also need to track my IP address and send that to my supervisor so she can get me access to the new interface.

So far, I'm really enjoying the flexibility of this internship.  I like that I am learning a lot about web archiving and that I also have the chance to bring ideas to the table.  My site supervisor has been very supportive in answering my questions and seems open to the suggestions I have brought up.  I'm looking forward to getting into the video creation process.  Script-writing, here I come!