In a 1914 speech to the National Press Club, Woodrow Wilson expressed “I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow…I am listening, I am diligently trying to collect all the brains that are borrowable in order that I may not make more blunders than it is inevitable that a man should make who has great limitations of knowledge and capacity.”
I admittedly don’t know that much about the man himself, but I look forward to getting to know him over the next couple of weeks. World War I as a whole is a time period I’m more familiar with having studied the literature produced during and after the Great War, so I’m definitely looking forward to returning to the early 1900’s, learning about Wilson’s presidency and handling of the war on a more personal level, and also how the war affected the city of Staunton, if at all.
Similarly, I don’t have a lot of hands on experience in an actual archive. I’ve done some volunteering at a local heritage center staffed purely by other volunteers where I observed and helped in that awkward peripheral kind of way, but couldn’t quite get my hands dirty. So this week was exciting for me in that Mark let us hit the ground running; I never knew I’d get so excited over giant folders with lots of smaller folders inside at 10 o’clock in the morning.
About half of the archive’s photo collection, having previously been digitized by another intern, was publicly available online. The other half was still private, lonely digitized images waiting for more bits and pieces to be added to them in order to be published for public viewing. Through Omeka, a web-based publishing platform mostly used in libraries, museums, and archives, Mark had us inputting data for the title, creator, data, source, and contributor Dublin Core fields in addition to each image’s physical dimensions.
Honestly, I was kind of relieved to see the Dublin Core fields since I just finished a whole spring semester’s worth of studying metadata where DC was basically all we practiced with in addition to MODS and VRA Core 4.0, the latter of which I did not get along with. At all. Ironically, our class didn’t really touch on encoded archival description (EAD) beyond the basic reading about it, knowing about it, and moving on. Because of this I’m hoping to actually try it out, to maybe make a finding aid or something since I feel like I’m going to need it later down the line. I won’t complain about Dublin Core though; it’s so user friendly and easy to follow along and Omeka’s interface is actually really nice and fun to use.
I want to say that in just a week I’ve gotten through maybe…200 items? Honestly, the best part of each day is finding out what’s in each folder, so lots of super small moments that add up in three and a half hours. There’s a small label tag with a very brief description such as “World War I” or “Versailles Peace Conference”, but sometimes what’s inside is so much more than that. Something described as just “World War I” could actually be a field full of soldiers on horseback or with a group of cannons so then you have to think of what to actually title the digitized image to best convey what it’s about. I’m not generally someone who likes surprises, but I like these. I try not to ‘ohh’ and ‘ahh’ too much, but sometimes it’s hard not to, especially when you’re holding actual photographs from 1912 that someone’s physically written a note on the back of. It’s the little things.
I actually like what I’m doing and I like working with Mark. I’ve yet to be bored — slightly unnerved by the creaky silence of the Library and Research Center building — but I’m actually motivated to get up in the morning, to drive 45 minutes to get to WWPL, and to open folders and find out what’s inside; to piece together the life of man born in Staunton as told through photographs. To use my brain to the best of its ability and to put all the things I’ve been studying for the past two years to use, to borrow Mark’s brain to find out what all he knows that he can teach to me.
I’m excited to find out what comes after we finish up with the photo collection, but I already know I’m going to miss it.
