This week I wrapped up the Ochs Collection spreadsheet, with help from Mark, who wanted to help me get ahead so I’d get some experience in other areas.
I made good progress in one of those other areas through working on the Bouman Collection, one of my first digitization projects from my volunteer days at WWPL. Although I scanned all the letters from the collection to multipage PDFs a few years ago so the donor could have a digital copy, they had not yet been uploaded to the Omeka site. I asked Mark this week if I could contribute to digitizing this collection, because I have the knowledge of the collection that would help get the work done quickly, and because the bulk of the collection will provide great material for the library to use during the upcoming centennial of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
Jon Anthony Bouman was a British AP correspondent who was working in Europe during WWI. The bulk of the collection is letters from Bowman to his wife and children from Paris during the 1919 peace conference and from Germany during the 1920s. While the subject is a little off course from my project topic, the letters offer great insights into both the peace conference and the cultural atmosphere of postwar Europe.
In addition, I got to experience a stage of the digitization process that I had not worked with before. Mark showed me how to upload the PDFs to a host site that provides Omeka with URLs. I completed this stage of the process and also got through about half of the .csv spreadsheet of metadata for the collection.
