The KY-NDNP Program Manager oversees everything; from budget concerns, title selection, and historic essays to student management, batch creation, validation, and delivery to the Library of Congress. One of the most frequent questions we get is What do you look for in a program manager? The answer is It depends on what they're going to do exactly. In the case of KY-NDNP the Program Manager needs good organizational skills to juggle many roles and good time manegement skills. Technical skills are great but those can be learned - the nature of the program will see to it along the way - but the ability to communicate within one's program staff as well as the NDNP community as a whole cannot be overstated.
KY-NDNP Program Manager Schematic
Having in-house production facilities, for KY-NDNP at least, means employing student workers for the manual steps of the process. Rather than the Program Manager, who for KY-NDNP oversees every aspect of the program from start to finish, ideally a Production Manager would bear the burdon of day-to-day operations associated with the student workforce. This is the most time intensive part of the process because the students workers carry the lion's share of the manual manipulation. They also require a considerable amount of administrative oversight as schedules/new hires fluctuate making training a constant. A more perminent workforce, or an outsource operation, would somewhat negate the need for a Production Manager position.
Positions with a Production Manager
The Office Manager retrieves and returns master negative microfilm to and from the UKPDP vault. This position also handles the inventory and labeling of the print masters bound for the Library of Congress. Having an extensive background in newspapers, the Office Manager also assists the Program Manager at UK with the intellectual collation of the newspapers on microfilm.
The Image Management Specialist (IMS) is crucial to the KY-NDNP production process. The IMS, with a decade's experience in scanning all manner of materials including microfilm, does all of the newspaper scanning for KY-NDNP. For those periods where production has been outsourced, the IMS has continued to scan the newspaper page images in-house. (SEE: Infrastructure for more) It's doubtfull that this aspect of the workflow will ever be assigned to an outside entity.
Finally, student workers are the backbone of the KY-NDNP operation. We rely on them for the majority of the manual processing. These include image manipulation (split, crop, and deskew) and OCR zoning.
