Hey All! Today was a busy week for the Chapbooks group as we had our in class presentation on Tuesday, and a very lengthy meeting on Thursday. Having the presentation at the beginning of the week had much of us busy over the weekend putting the finishing touches on our ideas for what we want this chapbook project to be. Each of us had a specific component of the project that we were to discuss in the presentation while also discussing what each of our themes were going to be. It was my responsibility to present Omeka which is the website that we will be hosting our online exhibit on. Omeka has been discussed quite a bit throughout this course and one of the reoccurring comments about the website is how easy it is to use for even the most novice of computer techies. For our chapbooks group however this was not our experience. Thankfully Mellissa once again came to our rescue and was able to give me a brief tutorial on Omeka and I discovered that it was in fact very simple to use, once you got the hang of it. I am excited by what Omeka can offer and the group was informed on Thursday that the library has approved us to upgrade our Omeka page which will supply us with many more themes, gadgets, and space to help us create the most comprehensive exhibit that we can.
After out presentation on Tuesday the group got together in the archives Thursday morning for our weekly meeting. The goal of the meeting was to become familiarized with the scanning process which is going to be an essential part of our project progress this coming week. While the scanning seems rather simple, we have to be reminded that some of the documents we are handling are well over 200 years old so the care and attention that needs to be put into this work is very high. The last thing we want to do is destroy the artifacts that we are trying so hard to preserve and digitize. After we had all become a bit more comfortable with the scanning process it was important to decide on times in which we would all need to book out the room. The scanning room is very popular and we do not have priority over any other project so this may be a problem moving forward with conflicts of timing.
The goal this week is to finalize my pick of chapbooks and begin scanning them. I have booked out a couple hours in the scanning room for Monday afternoon and hope to get the majority of my scanning done during this time. Once I have my scanned images I will be able to begin analyzing the chapbooks and their stories which will allow me to begin building my exhibit. On top of that our group will continue to meet during our regular scheduled class time on Tuesday, as well as at our weekly meetings on Thursday. The goal for the group is to have the majority of our scanning done by the time we meet back up on Thursday.
Nate's HIST*4170 Blog 