WWPL Volunteer Diaries

I finally finished the finding aid for the Race and Segregation collection! It’s so satisfying to finally see it completed and to have one less thing on my to-do list. It’s been a crazy week preparing for finals and balancing my work and school schedule, but thankfully it’s starting to wrap up nicely.

For my last week at the library I’m going to continue to tie up the loose ends for the digitization of the race and segregation collection. I only have about fifty more files to upload to the website.

As those who have been reading my blog likely know, I’ve come across a lot of sources related to lynchings in the US that have been eye opening for me. But the thousands who lost their lives to mob violence are finally getting a memorial. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is opening today (04/26) in Montgomery, AL.

The memorial looks beautiful, and has an accompanying museum which documents the lives of the people killed and the historical factors that allowed such violence to occur. The structure contains 800 monuments, representing every county in the US where lynchings occurred, and each contains the names of all the victims.

I’m really glad that something has been made to honor the people who had their lives cut short. I’m also glad that the museum acknowledges the effects of slavery that most schools overlook, like the degradation, the loss of humanity, the pain and anguish it caused for generations.

I hope I can go and see it someday. You can check out the new museum site below!

https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/

 

This week I kept working on the finding aid. I’m about a quarter of the way through now. The documents I’ve come across this week are mostly dealing with the horrors of lynching in the 1920s. Reading some of these actually makes my stomach turn.

I keep reading stories about people getting dragged from their homes at night, getting shot, burned alive. I knew that lynchings were bad, but I never realized how bad. In school they overlook the worst cases, and I was so shocked reading some of these cases that people brought to Wilson’s cabinet.

The worst one is where a local police department turned over a black prisoner to a mob, who then burned the man alive. The governor of Mississippi claimed that he didn’t have any way to stop it, and that he couldn’t call in the national guard. The thing that disgust me the most is the fact that the local law enforcement didn’t even try to uphold the rights of their prisoner. They just willingly turned him over to this horrid mob.

I’m certainly learning a lot that I didn’t know by working on this project. While a lot of the documents I’m thumbing through are kind of depressing, I think it’s good to learn about these things so that people don’t romanticize the past. I’m definitely glad that I live in the time I do now. With all the problems in the world and in our country, especially regarding race relations, we’ve made great strides away from the atrocities of our past. Hopefully we’ll continue to learn and become better over the decades.

This week I continued working on the finding aid for the Race and Segregation collection, and sorting through the digitized files. I’m about halfway through it now. Unfortunately, I’m finding way more files that were never uploaded than I’d hoped. I’ve at least made all the metadata for them so that it’ll be easier to upload them later.

On my work from home day I continued working on the finding aid, and adding more items to the list.

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.

I wish these posts could be a bit more interesting for you, the reader’s sake. But this week I once again delved into making a finding aid for the race and segregation collection, while checking to see if things have been uploaded to the site.

The files I’m looking at this week are interesting at least, even if the subject matter is gruesome. The section I’ve been thumbing through this week has had to do with lynchings and race riots that occurred during Wilson’s presidency. The details are pretty horrible; people getting dragged from their homes, set upon by mobs and burned alive, and more things that turn one’s stomach.

As horrible as all those things are though, I think the worst thing is the reaction of the Justice Department when citizens brought pleas for them to them to do something. Time and time again, the Attorney General said that it was the responsibility of the states to resolve these issues, and that he had no jurisdiction. Essentially, he was saying it wasn’t his problem.

It’s a very dark chapter in this country’s history. Reading through these stories leave a sour taste in my mouth and a heavy pit in my stomach. The indignation and anger I feel that these people never received justice, not from the Justice Department and certainly not from their state and local governments, can be overpowering at times.

Wilson finally made a public statement denouncing the violence against African-Americans, but it was too little too late. So many had already been violently killed at that point, and a statement isn’t the same as actual legal change.

Hopefully I get through this section soon and get to something slightly less depressing. Luckily, I have plenty of podcasts about the crazy lives of others to keep my spirits up and the time passing.

This week I continued working on creating a finding aid for the race and segregation collection. The project is coming along, little by little. Although, I am hitting some snags along the way.

It seems like the collection wasn’t uploaded in its entirety after all. I’m finding several files that were never put up for public access, or files that have pages missing. Once I finish the library guide, I’ll turn my focus to uploading anything that was never put up.

Another issue I’ll have to deal with though is the labeling of the files. I’ve run into several files where they’ve been uploaded to the site, but under the wrong identifier, which has caused quite a headache when trying to find a page. This is another problem I’ll troubleshoot as I go through the process.

Even though this is a tiring project, at least I’m doing something helpful by correcting any mistakes that were made. It’ll be satisfying to finally have it completed, and correctly. If anything, this project has shown me just how important it is to have coherence and organization whenever passing projects on.

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.