Author: Maria Matlock

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.

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 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”

This week I started the project of transcribing documents from the digital collections. After being walked through the procedure and how to format my transcriptions, I delved into the many letters, memos, and other documents waiting to be deciphered. I actually really enjoy this project. I like the challenge of trying to sift through the scrawling text, which can be difficult at times when the writing is small or sloppy. There’s one letter from someone at the Department of the Navy to Wilson that I’m trying to transcribe that is proving very difficult. The cursive text is tightly bound, and many of the letters are not exactly perfect cursive. There are a few revisions that were added in as well that add more symbols to be deciphered. Continue reading “Week two: 01/24-01/26”

My first week at the library began with light snows and very cold winds. The grounds surrounding the library and museum look lovely blanketed in white, and the stillness of the air is calming. The view from the reading room window is peaceful. Continue reading “Week one: 01/17-01/19”