Ceilyn Boyd has been an applications development programmer and project manager in scientific visualization and computer graphics at several research and commercial organizations, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mitsubishi Electric, and BBN Corporation. She also spent seven years as the sole proprietor of an art glass studio, and she has taught art technique to adults and teens in the Boston area. Her current interests include digital asset management and preservation, facilitating access to and analysis of preserved assets using visualization technologies, and ethics in Internet research. She has a BA in linguistics (Stanford University), an MA in anthropology and women’s studies (Brandeis University), and an MSLIS (Simmons).

Ceilin Boyd’s year-long appointment in the Harvard University Library (HUL) is made possible through Harvard University’s Administrative Fellowship Program (AFP). Through AFP (http://www.oap.harvard.edu/afp ), Harvard seeks to attract talented professionals, especially more ethnic minorities. In addition, the University encourages applications from individuals from all backgrounds who are committed to addressing the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in academic administration to administrative professional careers in higher education.

To this end, the Administrative Fellowship Program offers a twelve-month management experience complemented by a professional development program. The program provides participants with opportunities to broaden their experience through working in an academic environment as mid-level administrators. The program, which is in its 20th year of operation, seeks to enrich and diversify the Harvard community by bringing talented professionals to Cambridge.

Ceilyn Boyd was interviewed for Library Notes on January 5.

LN
You came to Harvard with wide-ranging experience in industry. You’re also an active professional artist and the owner of a studio in art glass. How does library science fit into the world of your interests?

CB
I enjoy making interdisciplinary ideas and complex relationships manifest in the real world through visual and textual means. To accomplish these goals, I use abstract tools such as research, analysis, and computer programming, and more tangible tools such as glass and enamels. As a field, library and information science provides a rich, historically expansive source of intellectual tools and strategies for organizing information, making it a natural fit for me.

LN
Your Stanford degree is in linguistics. How did you choose that field?

CB
I was very interested in artificial intelligence [AI], and at the time Stanford didn’t have an undergraduate degree in computer science; linguistics was one of the common pathways into AI.

LN
Did you study art?

CB
Although I do not have a degree in the field, I have attended art classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Extension School of the University of California, Los Angeles.

LN
How quickly did you go on to graduate school?

CB
Quite a number of years later. I first worked at SRI International performing research in natural language processing and text understanding. Later, I was involved in the business side of AI—industry analysis, trend analysis, and market analysis.

To get back into the development side of things, I left SRI for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whereI became involved in scientific visualization. It was satisfying to me to be involved with scientists—gamma ray physicists and oceanographers, for instance—who needed the support of technologists to help them do their work, to help them gain insight into the structure of their data sets. From there I went into the entertainment industry, to Pacific Title and Art Studio, a company that had been in existence since 1919. They were creating a facility to do digital film processing, and I joined them to help them build their software infrastructure and to do special-effects work.

LN
Did you just say to yourself, “I’m going into the entertainment world today”? What was the transition?

CB
I like frontiers. I like to go into a new realm, identify its open questions and challenges, and start participating. I’m not very fond of suburbs, if you will; I’m much more of a “What’s over that hill?” kind of person, an innovator. I am not driven by a search for novelty. It’s a search for a particular type of problem-solving space. I was intrigued by the sorts of software development issues confronting the post-production entertainment industry.

LN
What did Harvard offer that convinced you to sign on to the AFP?

CB
The fellowship has two components. One is the participatory component in which you are embedded within a Harvard organization where you do some quantum of work.

LN
In your case it’s HUL: in the Office for Information Systems and in the Weissman Preservation Center.

CB
Exactly. Through the fellowship, I have a set of highly interesting tasks to accomplish in OIS and Weissman. But the other portion of the fellowship is training in, and exposure to, management and leadership development.

I initially thought that you had to pick up these skills by chance, over the course of your career. But Harvard has created a coherent pedagogy for acquiring this knowledge and developing these skills. The fellowship includes seminars and discussions with a vast number of professionals from education, from law, from business, all over the map. People who have reached a level of achievement and leadership in their careers and who really understand what it means to be a leader, and what it means to be a leader in an academic organization in particular. It’s an amazing opportunity to attend lectures, seminars, and so forth, to walk through case studies given by people who are at the top of their fields, and who have high-level positions at Harvard and other institutions. Their insights are invaluable.

It was this last component of the fellowship that really convinced me to apply.

LN
Let’s talk about your specific assignments in OIS and Weissman.

CB
HUL created a work portfolio of three projects for me: the e-mail archiving project that’s part of LDI . . .

LN
. . . which is hugely significant . . .

CB
. . . and the web-archiving project—both of which are in OIS—and a new audiovisual survey in Weissman. My participation in them varies from administration to implementation. Tracey Robinson, Randy Stern, and Wendy Gogel are the three people that I’m working most closely with in OIS. I am working with Jan Merrill-Oldham and Jane Hedberg in the Weissman Center.
 
LN
Our readers are somewhat familiar with the web-archiving pilot—WAX, we call it—but less so with the e-mail project. Will it roll out as WAX did, with a few pilot projects?

CB
Yes, the pilot will include the Countway Center for the History of Medicine, as well as the University Archives, and the Schlesinger Library. Each has identified a set or collection of e-mails that will meet the criteria for a meaningful pilot.

LN
Your Weissman project is quite different from the other two—your work on it has begun at a much more formative stage.

CB
Right. For the survey tool, one of my colleagues had already performed a substantial literature search pertaining to preservation and restoration of audiovisual materials, however the software requirements had not yet been defined. That’s where I came in—helping to define what that project looked like from a software standpoint and identifying the sort of information science, such as a taxonomy, that would be most effective.

Audiovisual materials are at significant preservation risk. They are decaying as we speak. And audiovisual preservation is a good example of how interdisciplinary library and information science has become. These sorts of projects need to involve people from a variety of backgrounds, from preservation to librarianship to sound engineering.

Harvard has incredibly rich collections of audiovisual materials that can’t be found anywhere else. To be good stewards, one of the first things you have to do is identify what we have and assess physical conditions of each item. The software we’re developing for the survey will support those assessments so that we can understand what we have, what condition it’s in, and what items are in most urgent need of preservation either because formats are becoming obsolete or because playback equipment is endangered.

Our pilot project is at the Harvard University Archives. We’re going to start there and move on.

I’ve always worked on projects as a member of a team where very different skill sets come together to help solve a problem. Certainly at Weissman on the survey tool, you’ll see that in action. You have somebody who knows technology, you have Elizabeth Walters who knows the audiovisual realm, Jane Hedberg and Jan Merrill-Oldham, who understand preservation management issues, and, of course, the content experts­—Megan Sniffin-Marinoff, Skip Kendall, Robin McElheny—from the University Archives.

LN
You’re emphasizing the lateral, as opposed to the hierarchical.

CB
Yes. I think that in many respects, the space where the best work gets done is lateral.

LN
Librarians are great collaborators. At Harvard, librarians probably have more experience than anyone else in working laterally—across disciplines and across organizational boundaries. And yet we’re always challenged to do more, to collaborate in new ways, to re-imagine our work.

CB
As a profession and as individual librarians, we have to embrace ambiguity and change in our field, as well as the new vocabulary of knowledge organization and management. In doing so, we are not selling out our profession. We’re in fact embracing the change that is already upon us.