i finally started volunteering this week: i’ve signed up to help this society that fights for the legal rights of marginalized persons archive media about them. i can probably best describe them as an activist advocacy think tank. they collect affadavits for their projects on sex work, addiction, low-income housing, and police corruption, then publish their findings in order to push for changes to laws--changes that would help the disenfranchised. this organization, let’s call it PLS, has a team of media archivists, including volunteers who scour the media looking for articles about the society and other volunteers (designers who know how to use photoshop) who scan in those articles, clean them up for reproduction, then lay them all out in an indesign document at the end of the year as a report to send to funders.

as you’d expect, i’m one of the latter. yesterday was my first “training” day; i went into the office and another volunteer took me through the process and gave me a bunch of files to work on at home. now, i’m a newbie, so i don’t want to rock the boat too much, but their archiving system is hideously inefficient: there’s lots of redundant work, the files are unnecessarily huge, and there isn’t a good sense of roles and end results. when i asked the other volunteer why they scanned articles in at a ridiculous 600 dpi, he answered, “i don’t know. we’ve never really talked about it.” when i asked why he wasn’t saving the images as TIFFs right off the bat, since that was the format they would probably eventually use anyway, he said, “i don’t know. we’ve never really talked about it.”

the whole process is, in theory, quite similar to our review collection process at d&m, only they don’t log their articles, they don’t have an efficient filing system for their scanned articles, and their electronic file management system is a bit of a mess. seems to be a consequence of the project getting stagnant at some point in the past, being revived, then being handed over hastily... it currently falls under the portfolio of someone who doesn’t actually handle publications.

i will keep my mouth shut for the next couple of weeks; at least until i finish processing the files that i have right now. that task should keep me quite well occupied. it looks like the senior volunteer on the project (who has only been on the team since january), is leaving at the end of april, so there is considerable turn-around. at that point, i’ll have to figure out how i fit in: do i make suggestions and try to streamline the process, or sit back and accept that the inefficiencies will continue given the nature of the organization and its volunteer base?

this is all, of course, assuming that they’ll even listen to me. we shall see. in any case, it appears the media archiving project is really a way for them to recruit designers; apparently, not long after the last person joined, she was thrust into this “emergency” design project of typesetting the society’s annual report. it may be a good way to get to work on fairly substantial design projects in short order, but for now, i’m just content to be applying my skill set to a cause that doesn’t expect me to do what i already do for eight hours every day.