NDSR residencies may be time-limited, but the impact they can have on residents’ careers can be far-reaching. For this series of interviews, we will be talking with former NDSR residents from various cohorts about how their residency affected them personally and professionally.
Program: New York 2014-2015
Host: New York University Libraries
Can you briefly (in a sentence or two) summarize what your residency focused on?
I worked with complex born-digital preservation and access, including emulation, migration, and digital forensics tools.
What aspects of your residency impacted you the most vis-a-vis your career trajectory?
Getting support to adapt the project to experiment deeply into some newish-to-the-field research in emulation and born-digital collection access.
What are the three most important skills you honed during your residency?
- Competency with command-line workflows (tech skills)
- Public speaking and self-advocacy skills
- Hands-on experience experimenting and building end-to-end digital processing workflows.
What advice do you have for future NDSR cohorts or other participants in early career residencies?
Think through what you want out of it carefully before committing. It’s a big commitment and the NDSR umbrella has historically meant a broad range of different experiences. Try to get a sense of whether or not you’ll be supported and you’ll work well with your mentors and the organization staff.
What is your favorite NDSR memory?
Brunching and boozing w/my cohort. 🙂
Anything else you’d like to add?
One of the more intangible aspects of stewardship is that it really made me realize I could contribute to the field, despite my relatively few years in the digital steward field.