personal project/summary

Modified: February 14, 2026 7:58 PM Category: GenAI Subcategory: ChatGPT Created: September 10, 2025 12:59 PM Master Type: Notes Hide: No Starred: No Status: Unassigned

Of course! Here’s a more polished, fleshed-out version of your personal/project summary — still in outline form, still with cute emojis, but now with a bit more flow and personality:

🌟 About You: Snapshot Summary

🏛️ Your Role & the Project

• You’re a collections and digitization specialist at a midsized fine arts museum, currently responsible for one of the largest and most significant projects the museum has ever taken on.
• You’re working solo to digitize, catalogue, and rehouse a massive, historic photograph archive documenting Black life in Memphis.
• The collection includes:
  • Acetate negatives, nitrate negatives, glass plate negatives, and photographic prints
  • Ephemera like letters, business cards, leaflets, and pamphlets
• Originally estimated at just 5,000 objects, the collection is now understood to contain 75,000 to 200,000+ items.
• You’re building the workflow and structure from the ground up, knowing the full process may take decades to complete.

💡 Even if you stay with the project for 5–10 years, you expect you may have to pass it on eventually — so you’re keeping longevity and documentation in mind.

🖥️ Your Digitization Workflow & Tools

You’ve created a thoughtful, high-quality digitization process using the following setup:

• 📷 Sony mirrorless camera (tethered)
• 💡 Kaiser copy stand, light panel, and LED lighting
• 💻 16” MacBook Pro running:
  • Capture One (for tethered image capture)
  • Adobe Photoshop (for creating digital positives and other enhancements)
    • With Actions to streamline repetitive steps
  • Terminal with ImageMagick (for bulk tasks like autocropping PSDs or converting TIFFs to JPGs)

You’re extremely comfortable with the tech, thanks to your past web and graphic design experience, even though you haven’t used those skills in years.

📦 Infrastructure, Timeline & DAMS Needs

• Your digitization lab wasn’t finalized until Dec. 2024, following several months of space reshuffling.
• The photograph collection arrived late, around May 2024, setting the project back from the start.
• You originally expected to use TMS Media Studio, but it’s now likely too expensive.
• You’re leaning toward using Pics.io with Wasabi for DAMS and storage, given your limited $25k/year budget and lack of in-house IT support.
• The collection’s long-term future involves:
  • Rehousing in archival storage
  • Deep cataloguing
  • Integration into museum systems and exhibitions

🏗️ The museum will move to a new building in summer 2026, with plans to reopen in winter 2026.

🖼️ The first exhibition of the Hooks Brothers photographs is expected to open in early 2027.

📰 Media Coverage & Public Awareness

• The collection was featured in a New York Times article:
  • 📅 Published online May 14, 2025, in print May 15, 2025
  • 📝 “‘A Priceless Inheritance’: Preserving Memories of Black Life in Memphis” by Rick Rojas
  • The article highlights the deep cultural importance of the collection and its potential to reshape public memory.
• It also misrepresents your coworker C. Rose Smith as being involved in digitization — something she does not do.

👥 Team Dynamics

• 👩‍💼 Your boss is very supportive, understanding, and specifically chose you for this role based on your skills and attitude — even without a formal photography background.
• 👓 C. Rose Smith, assistant curator of photography:
  • Friendly enough, but has a strong curator’s ego
  • Avoids the tedious, hands-on work of collections
  • Has dodged involvement with the photo archive in the past
  • The collections department is unimpressed with her engagement so far

🐾 You, Personally

• 🐱 You have 7 rescue cats — including Darcy, who has a vet appointment in September 2025
• 💖 You’re a devoted caregiver for your injured mom, who was seriously hurt in December 2024
• 🕰️ Your life outside of work is extremely full, and you don’t have much downtime — you’ve mentioned you’re overdue for catching up with friends (it’s been about a month)

🌈 What You Love

• 🖥️ Technology
• 🐾 Cats
• ✨ Glitter
• 💝 Your mom
• 📚 Writing fanfiction
• 🎨 Color
• 🦕 Dinosaurs, fossils, ancient history, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece
  • Your boss even knows you’d probably rather be working with fossils, but you’re content where you are

🍎 Tech Preferences

• You are a Mac and iOS user through and through
• You can use Windows, Android, or Linux if necessary, but find them unfamiliar for technical tasks and prefer to avoid them whenever possible

Would you like this exported to a text file or formatted as a printable doc later? I can also break it into sections if you’d like to use it for onboarding, grants, or project documentation.