At 11:00, I met with Nancy Kechner, Scholars’ Lab Coordinator and qualitative data analysis consultant, for our weekly supervisory meeting in the Scholars’ Lab.  Nancy was manning our public service desk in place of an absent student consultant.

Nancy, who earned her Ph.D. in pulmonary physiology and also coaches UVA’s women’s rugby team, can often be found helping students and faculty with their social science data and survey design.  Nancy has also been taking a strong role in student training and qualitative analysis support, particularly with N’Vivo.  Nancy and I discussed student staffing in the upcoming fiscal year, how we can best arrange and present our space to support and attract our core constituency (faculty and grad in the humanities and social sciences employing computing-based methodologies), and our upcoming speaker series events–all while helping out the occasional patron.  We directed someone interested in preserving audio cassettes to the Digital Media Lab in the adjacent Clemons Library.  The Digital Media Lab–a sister space of the Scholars’ Lab–focuses on the multimedia needs of scholarly in the arts while our friends in the Research Computing Lab offer data-based services to researchers in science and engineering departments.

Managing the public lab and our cadre of student consultants is one of my central duties, but it’s not always easy to integrate our deep consultation and R&D activities with the “on the ground” support available in the lab.  We’ve found that hosting a speaker series is one effective way of getting the word out about what we do without having to pitch our services like salesmen.  By putting time and effort into our graduate fellowship program–more later on that–and our events programming, we help foster an intellectual community centered physically in the Lab.  The conversations that arise at our talks are one important path to the innovative approaches and collaborative efforts we are eager to support in the Scholars’ Lab.