Hold on to your digits!

The WWC Archives is getting ready to go digital. Sort of.

We, as in the college, is a member of the Appalachian College Association, a consortium of 24 (or so) small colleges up and down and near the Appalachians. It maintains a website and the Digital Library of Appalachia, and other programs.  But for our purposes the DLA is the focus of our attention.  Heretofore, WWC has participated by uploading 60% of the Mountain Music College, full-length or partial clips of singers, songwriters, instrumentalists who are local, traditional musicians or who performed in music halls/festivals/venues here in the area. 

The DLA is now requesting members upload photographs from the collections.  I attended a training session on using the software to do this last year, except them I got busy and didn't have an opportunity to use it.  That, and Amanda is very excited about doing this kind of data work. 

Because when you digitize and add photos to a collection it's not just the digitization, it's the creation of metadata.  This will be a slow process with lots of edits and checks and re-checks along the way.  But soon enough we'll share our fabulous photograph collection with the rest of the world.

The people demand archives!

I don't think the archives has ever had 10 researchers in one day.  Fortunately (for them) they didn't all come at the same time because there's only 5 chairs in the reference area.

Proposals for the senior history theses are due Friday, and two students showed up for the first time today.  Awesome.  One of the topics won't be too difficult to research/write.  The other one will be.  The time to decide has passed this student by.  She's locked in and barely loaded.

I'm pretty sure I said in my intro to archives presentation "Come early, come often, stay late!"  I meant that.  The people may demand archives, but they'd better get there early enough to do the research.

In the hot spot...

We've reached that point in the semester where I am completely overrun--with reference, with students, with requests for my time and my brain and our records.  Working part-time when there are full-time demands is definitely not the way to go.  Not this week.

Fortunately, my student archivist has become bored with sleeving photographs, her current project, and eagerly took on two reference requests.  One was on the history of the lately departed Carson Hall; the other, how the furniture pieces in the Farm School's woodworking shop were sold or marketed.  Her attention to this level of detail and research will serve her well, as she is patiently sifting through a huge folder of financial records.  Awesome. Because I'm sifting through a pile of Henry Randolph correspondence from 1928 for a lecture I'm giving next Thursday.

And that means, of course, records go unprocessed, undescribed, uncataloged.  How to balance the life of research with that of making the records available.  The eternal dilemma of the lone arranger.

New year, new projects

It's the first full week of new semester at Warren Wilson.  The Archives now has a new student archivist, since Max graduated and left in the spring.  Amanda is a sophomore who worked on the library circulation crew.  She's picking up the photograph rehousing project started by Max; that job is a little more than half-finished.  She's also going to be doing data entry for uploading photos to the Digital Library of Appalachia and is learning how to scan images.

Speaking of scanning, IT services will be giving Archives its dedicated slide scanner sometime soon.  This will be a great addition as the Microtek 800 is fine for photos, it's not so hot for slides.  The Archives will become slide scanning central for the college community.  But not yet...

The other project that will consume a lot of time, especially for me, will be the reorganization and inventory of the Ben Holden presidential papers.  I've started some processing of this important collection, mostly in response to students looking for records to document papers from the 1970s & 80s.  This huge collection needs the work, but it may be some time before  I can finish.  Many, many more things are in the way.

No word yet on the integration of Archon and Archivists' Toolkit softwares.  Still waiting for this blessed event to occur so that archives can use ONE ultimate archival database.  Won't that be fun?