First, the University of Iowa Flood '08 Collection will include audio, images and text from the recent flood that hit the university community this June. I will be archiving a bunch of samples that document the flood. Additionally, I will be working with NPR's StoryCorps -- arranging interviews and such. These interviews, I presume, will be included in the Flood '08 digital library. My project will involve data migration along with the various duties included in arranging a digital library.
The M. Horvat Science Fiction Fanzine Collection will occupy my downtime with the Flood '08 collection. I will be working with Special Collections in the University of Iowa Libraries to design a customized interface for the collection. I will be contacting faculty to ascertain most helpful features the website can provide for research of the materials.
This summer I worked at Widernet. I tested the feasibility of implementing a dynamic PHP & MySQL web application in "the field" (meaning the African countries using the eGranary portals). This task occupied most of my summer because the web application performed much slower than anticipated. I many different server stress tests, using JMeter, to understand why the dynamic web application performed poorly. We concluded that much more work will need to be done on optimizing the MySQL database queries in order to implement the web application on older web server machine out "in the field".
