By Haley Bryant
This summer, GRASAC welcomes five new Graduate Student Research Assistants through the University of Toronto’s Work Study program: Chantelle Perreault, Olivia White, CJ Pentland, Alesha Grummett-Roesch, and Rachel Barber-Pin. The students will be contributing to the ongoing work of re-developing the GKS database by supplementing existing item records, adding new item records, and researching best practices around issues of copyright and data organization. Chantelle and Olivia comprise the team researching and implementing a Controlled Vocabulary for new and existing item records, which will make searching in the GKS and locating items by keyword much easier. Alesha, CJ, and Rachel will be assisting Prof. Laura Peers to define a new set of copyright and permissions guidelines for the images and records in the GKS, as well as ingesting a new set of records from the Ethnologisches Museum, and potentially others as time permits. The team is guided by GRASAC members Prof. Heidi Bohaker, Prof. Cara Krmpotich, Prof. Laura Peers, PhD student in History Mia McKie, and PhD Student in Information Haley Bryant. Additionally, this team is in the process of re-establishing the GRASAC public website, currently hosted at Carleton University, at U of T and will be enlisting the help of a Graduate Student Research Assistant to migrate the content from the old site to a new, similar version. This offers an excellent opportunity for us to update information about our Steering Committee members, current and past Research Assistants, and project updates. Keep an eye out!
– Written by Haley Bryant, May 2020