Marian Smith

University of Houston Libraries is pleased to welcome Marian Smith as the new reformatting projects librarian.

Please describe your role. How does your work align with the student success and research productivity focus of the University?

In the Preservation and Reformatting Department (PARD), I work on project planning for the reformatting aspect. This means my focus is on planning and coordination with other departments, the how-to bits, and troubleshooting that goes into taking an item and making it a digital object. The reformatting process assists in preservation by extending the life of our resources and connecting UH students and researchers to the information they need to further their research.

Please share a bit about your background and professional interests. How do these inspire and shape your approach as a librarian?

I earned my bachelor’s degree in Supply Chain Management here at the University of Houston, and soon learned that my interest in the field was information dissemination and not so much business. After that realization, I then enrolled at the University of North Texas and earned my master’s degree in Library Science, with a focus in Archival Studies and Imaging Technology. After graduating with my master’s, I came back to campus on a contract position as a digital technician, and worked on the Thesis and Dissertation Digitization project. Once my contract wrapped up, I took a pitstop as a librarian on the digitization team at Houston Public Library before making my way to this position.

My interest in how information is delivered has really shaped how I approach reformatting, and has fascinated me with how reformatting can both preserve and enhance the viewing of an object. There are both opportunities to provide additional accessibility tools (additional descriptions, optical character recognition [OCR], and such) and challenges regarding what is lost in the reformatting of an object (a loss of digital or physical manipulation, the question of how much can you do before it’s an entirely new object, and similar thoughts). It is a topic with no clear-cut lines or standard answer, but is something I keep in mind.

What are one or two things you’d like faculty, students, and scholars to know about the function/purpose of preservation and reformatting?

Preservation and reformatting at the heart of it is a series of tasks done to extend the life of both physical and digital objects. Reformatting can be viewed as a set of processes underneath the preservation umbrella, adding an additional form to the original object; think taking a century old book and after carefully scanning each page, stitching it together into a PDF that you can read. For researchers, a PDF grants easier access to the book’s contents without the need to pull the book from storage and flip through in person.

The next question someone may have is ‘why keep the book if we have a reformatted version of it?’ The book itself may be of use in the future for research not related to the words of the book, such as swabbing for fiber content that will expound on binding practices of the area in which the book was printed. Maybe a closer in-person examination can lead to a new discovery.