Experience Profile- Emily Homolka

Hi y'all! My name is Emily Homolka, and I am midway through my Master’s of Library and Information Studies degree at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus. I will be working with DOH over the summer as a CO-OP student, and will be in this position until the end of August. 

I am deeply interested in working with local heritage institutions, and in leveraging the resources that a larger institution has access to in order to support members of its community. Working with and for local communities is what drew me to library work in the beginning, and DOH is a wonderful project to experience that with. Being able to learn about the rich history of the Okanagan and surrounding region during my time here, and knowing that I am able to help contribute to making that history more visible and accessible is an incredible bonus as well.

As with the graduate students who came before me in this position, I will be helping to oversee the digitization of the materials that DOH receives from their partners, including the creation and application of metadata, which will help contextualize the items, as well as increase their accessibility. I am also in charge of communications and social media, so if you see any posts that you especially like I'm the one who created it! If you don't really like it, someone else probably made it. 

Some of the other projects that I will be tackling this summer include creating a set of instructional materials to help guide project partners in beginning these digitization projects in house, including scanning and basic metadata creation. These will be up on our DOH Toolkit page later in the summer, so keep an eye out! I have also been tasked with reaching out and connecting with the project partners that DOH has been lucky enough to work with, to better understand the role that DOH has performed for these institutions, and to gain a better sense of the history and importance of the items that have been digitized as a result of this project. I look forward to seeing how DOH continues to develop!