Author: Rachel Dark

This week I wrapped up my internship by finishing scanning the Alexandria Cantonment book. It’s easy to see how the book might be a valuable resource to a military historian or genealogist, since the photos are very clear and well-labeled. I enjoyed some of the narration in the book as well, such as the history of the camp bakery.

I also did some more transcription for several documents in the Ochs collection on Tuesday, when I wasn’t able to get into the building.

Overall, this has been a great experience. I’ve enjoyed working with the collections here, learning from Mark, and getting hands-on experience with archival preservation, both on- and offline.

This week I put finishing touches on the online exhibit, and Mark made it public. It was really exciting to see all my hard work come together and to be able to share it with friends and family, as well as with my faculty advisor, who said it looked wonderful.

Since I still have several hours left in the internship, I began scanning a book called the Autobiography of Alexandria Cantonment, a yearbook-type chronicle of a WWI camp in Alexandria, Louisiana. There are some short histories and descriptions, alongside page after page of photographs of soldiers and staff at the camp. There’s a ton of content to scan, and I hope I’ll be able to complete it by the time my internship ends.

This week I completed my draft of the exhibit and was able to go over it with Mark. He said it was pretty much in line with what he was looking for but gave me a few suggestions for editing and wanted me to refine the way I sourced information at the bottom of each page.

I focused on this during editing, offering thumbnail images that would link readers to other documents where they could read more, in addition to providing a text link to the collection for each soldier. I also thought it would be great to add a “The rest of the story” section at the bottom of each page with a sentence narrating what happened after the focus of the exhibit. I did some general editing as well.

This week I had the exciting job of putting together everything I’ve learned into an online exhibit.

For now, I’m focusing on learning how to use the Exhibit Builder plugin in Omeka and creating a draft of the exhibit so I can get further feedback from Mark.

Exhibit Builder was a little tricky to learn; like the rest of Omeka, it’s not really intuitive. However, I got in a lot of good troubleshooting practice and learned how to update the plugin when it isn’t working correctly as well as how to navigate Omeka tutorials and help forums–all useful experience.

I currently have three exhibit pages, one for each soldier whose scrapbook I’ve digitized, each representing a different place for American soldiers during the war (training camps, the front, and non-combat work). I’m mixing quotations with images to help readers experience each soldier’s story.

It was especially satisfying to pull together materials from the Ochs collection to create an overarching narrative that shows how he developed as a person and how his attitude toward not fighting matured. There are also some good “slice of life” quotes as he describes the war happening around Paris. I was excited to find photos of the “Big Bertha” gun he mentions at one point in one of the other online collections, so I’m including those pictures in the page so readers can see what he was talking about.

There’s still one more page left, plus the introduction to the exhibit, before I can call it a full draft, so I will work on finishing those early next week.

This week I completed the transcriptions from the Ochs collection that I may use in the exhibit, which was helpful review of relevant information that I can include in the exhibit. The Ochs collection is so large that there were many important pieces of his career that I had missed or forgotten. I was able to fill in the timeline a little and do some brainstorming for the exhibit outline as well.

I hope to present Mark with this outline next week and see what advice he may have for me.

This was a short week, since I had to miss internship for a work-related event on Tuesday, and Wednesday we got 10 inches of snow. To make up for the hours I missed, I spent some time at home transcribing letters from the Ochs collection that I think will be relevant to the online exhibit.

Once I was able to get back to internship, I visited the soldiers’ lives exhibit at the museum to get inspiration.

This exhibit focuses on three soldiers and a nurse and includes a brief bio of each, as well as documents and artifacts that illustrate their experiences during the war.

I’d like to do something similar with my project, although I hope to arrange it in somewhat chronological order rather than by person. It helps that each soldier’s period of activity in his respective collection already falls into order, more or less. For example: Ambuehl (training camps), Cahill (trenches and early wounding), Ochs (work with the Stars and Stripes and post-war military career). I need to decide whether to include a fourth section on Ambuehl’s death or include that in the first section.

This week I completed scanning the Cahill Collection and created the .csv metadata spreadsheet, which included a transcription of Cahill’s letter to his sister.

It was the letter that sparked the beginning of my planning for my online exhibit. Some of Cahill’s descriptions of the front are truly heartrending, and I couldn’t help thinking about Ambuehl and Ochs, and where their experiences paralleled and diverged. Ambuehl surely experienced some of the same sights and sounds and fears and annoyances as Cahill, but most of his letters home from his time in France were lost. Did he write some of the same things, or did he try to sugarcoat his experiences so his sister wouldn’t worry about him? And, unlike Cahill, Ambuehl didn’t make it home. He could have been one of the wounded that Cahill saw carried away from the trenches, the stretchers dripping with blood.

And Ochs, who often complained about not being stationed at the front but fought his own kind of war at the Stars and Stripes office–how would he have coped with the tragedies Cahill saw? One thing Cahill writes that really stuck with me was that the soldiers who complained at camp when things were easy were the most resilient on the front and encouraged the other men not to lose heart. While I tend to think of Ochs as an impulsive kid with a tendency to complain, maybe he would have held his own in the trenches after all.

What I’d like to do is focus on weaving together the stories of the three soldiers my internship has focused on so far (Ambuehl, Ochs, and Cahill) and show how the materials in WWPL’s collections reveal different aspects of soldiers’ experiences during WWI. The Ambuehl collection focuses on military training camps, as well as the death of a soldier, while the Cahill collection documents a soldier’s experience on the battlefield and the Ochs collection follows a soldier’s career away from the trenches.

I began a rough timeline of events in the solders’ lives as documented in the collections, and I’ll continue thinking about how to arrange the exhibit and what materials to include. Once I have a better outline for the exhibit, I’ll present it to Mark.

This week I finished up the spreadsheet for the Bouman Collection and started in on scanning the Cahill Collection.

This collection is a small packet of photos and one letter by Edward Cahill, a WWI soldier. Most of the photos are of Cahill and his wife post-war, but there are three photos of a young Franklin D. Roosevelt with soldiers at the beginning of the war. I’m not sure if Cahill is in these photos or not, it’s hard to tell. The letter was written when Cahill was at Walter Reed hospital, and when I read it I learned that he was one of the first American soldiers wounded in the war. The letter is to his sister, describing his experiences in France.

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.

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.