Month: February 2018

This week I continued going through the Race and Segregation Collection trying to find the ones that hadn’t been uploaded. I’m still finding a lot that haven’t been put up, and if they were maybe not under the identifiers on the folders. It’s been tedious work, but I’m glad to be getting it more organized.

I’m about a little more than a quarter of the way through the box now, and hopefully I’ve found all the ones that still needed to be uploaded. I have noticed that all the ones that needed to be uploaded were about a Department of Agriculture survey of African-American employees. Most of these documents are just bureau and office heads sending letters with maybe a few short names of their black employees, or just simply one line saying that they have none. I can see why these never got uploaded. It’s pretty dull and there are so many letters like this on this one subject.

Hopefully once I get through the entire Department of Agriculture I’ll be done uploading new docs and be able to just focus on the metadata.

As I continue work on the Ochs Collection, I began an important step in the digitization process: scanning the documents!

I am scanning each document as an archival PDF, rather than JPEGs like I did for the Ambuehl Collection, which was mostly photographs. As many of the documents are multipage and/or double-sided, I’ve brushed up on my PDF editing skills by creating multipage PDFs so each page will be in the same file.

At the end of the week I took a break from scanning to catch up on filling in the metadata spreadsheet for this collection. I wasn’t able to complete it earlier, because it needed file names for each item. I’m also working on adding tags and LCSH subjects to the items as well. This part is a little slower going than I had hoped, since the subjects of the documents are a little more varied than the ones in the Ambuehl collection–so that means less copy-pasting, and more time spent getting familiar with LCSH.

After pouring through the Race and Segregation files and comparing them with what was on the excel sheet, I thought I was close to finishing the project. I had found a few files that had no website addresses on file for them, and could not locate them on the Omeka site. After bringing this up with my supervisor, I was told to start uploading them to Omeka.

I enjoyed getting to put new stuff up on the site. However, the more files I went through, the fewer I found on Omeka. Again I asked my supervisor about this and I was told that many of the files had been uploaded to a cloud server until they could be put on the website. That was when I realized that the site addresses that were on file were for this cloud server, and that only a small portion of the collection had actually been uploaded online. I then spent the next few days uploading files and creating the metadata and excel file for them.

I worked on transcriptions from home on Fridays as usual. I finally finished transcribing the letter to Wilson from his niece. I was able to decipher one set of text that I had been trying to make out for over a week. I thought the section had read “Atty Ben Arbuckle” and had thought it was a very odd name. However, after looking at it i realized it said Atty. Gen. I looked this up and realized it was another abbreviation for Attorney General. It was satisfying to finally figure the whole letter out.

 

This week I completed the metadata spreadsheet for the Ochs Collection. Drawing from my prior knowledge of the collection, along with the donor file for Shelby Ochs Owen, I also created a finding aid and box list for the collection. This will help researchers learn more about the collection and identify what folders they may want to look at. The finding aid will also become part of the collection description in the Omeka elibrary.

Next week, I should begin work on scanning the documents so they can be uploaded online. As I’m now almost halfway through my internship, I would also like to begin fleshing out my plan for the online exhibit I will create for my final project.

This week I finished filing all the documents from the Ochs scrapbook and began adding metadata for each item in a .csv spreadsheet. The parameters are the same ones I worked with for the Ambuehl collection, so the process has been fairly straightforward so far. Continue reading “Week 4 – Ochs Collection”

This week I started yet another project. Mark decided he would like for me to work on organizing the excel data sheet for the Race and Segregation Collection. The items in this collection have already been posted online and for the most part have all the metadata, subjects and tags attached to them. My job will be to go through the file and make sure that the data in the excel sheet matches what is online, and to update it if not. Continue reading “Week three: 01/31-02/02”

I completed a few more transcriptions for the Ambuehl Collection, and then Mark instructed me on how to upload the collection and metadata to Omeka using a .csv file. All of this is new to me, as I haven’t worked with .csv files before. Unfortunately, not all of the files transferred. Continue reading “Week 3 – Ochs Collection”

In addition to completing the collection description on Omeka, I spent this week compiling a spreadsheet of metadata for the digitized items in the Ambuehl collection. Continue reading “Week 2: Ambuehl Collection”