Newsletter: Summer (June-July-August) 2009
The Craft Revival project has been shifting gears of late. We are winding up our funding from the State Library, working anew with the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, and waiting to hear from IMLS. Each aspect of our funding has different priorities and so we are moving forward on several levels.
State Library site visit
In early July, a group of folks from the State Library met with our project team and partners. Partners attending the meeting included Vicki Cruz, Qualla Arts and Crafts; Bo Taylor, Museum of Cherokee; and Deb Schillo, Southern Highland Craft Guild. The group met for a wrap up discussion in Cherokee surrounded by crafts collection on view at Qualla Arts. The team showed off additions to the site.
Database images
Numbers have always been a priority and we’ve exceeded the project’s goal. Anna Craft made a tally of the number of digital files that have been uploaded to the database. As of the July 10 meeting, the Craft Revival collection contained 4,143 digital images. This collection is growing into an amazing resource. We’ve actually done little to promote the site, except for a few articles in local and Asheville papers, but we continue to receive requests and field questions from near and far.
|
Year 1 |
Year 2 |
Year 3 |
Year 4, to date |
Total |
Digital files submitted and uploaded |
305 |
1317 |
1288 |
1271 |
4143 |
Database uploads
We have continued to upload a number of items from project partners. From the Folk School we received a 1926 Brasstown Community Fair bulletin, a photograph of Marguerite Butler and Olive Campbell, and an inscription from Allen Eaton to Kate “Granny” Donaldson. From the Cherokee Museum we’ve added a number of historic photographs, including some of Lottie Stamper and Will West Long. Kate Carter finished scanning the last of the Museum’s Cherokee Indian Fair programs. Along with a 1929 program from the Hunter, all of the fair programs in our collections up online and readable. The Mountain Heritage Center sent in photographs of carvings, plus a 360-degree view of one of the carvings. Penland contributed photographs by Bayard Wootten. At Qualla Arts, Lucas Rogers photographed an entire batch of honeysuckle baskets by Lucy George and other 20th century makers. These are now up. The Home Team has gone back and re-scanned a number of items. We’ve replaced old images to provide better quality scans of a number of documents, including letters written by Frances Goodrich. The Guild sent in a Southern Highlanders brochure from the New York City shop, a letter to Clementine Douglas, and a collection of historic fiber tools. These tools nicely complement the woodworker tools in the collection of the Mountain Heritage Center. We continue—with Deb Schillo—to build a collection of weave patterns. In her lifetime study of coverlets, Frances Goodrich collected sample patterns and made large watercolor paintings of each pattern. The guild also submitted scans of weave pattern samples from Goodrich's Allanstand sample book.
New Search page
Probably the most significant change made to the website of late has been to re-vamp the Search function. On the basic Search page, we pared down the number of choices, focusing on those that we expect to be the most popular. We also added a link to the Advanced Search. Thanks to Joel Marchesoni for getting this done. Joel has also added Google Analytics code to all pages, so we can begin to track the number of hits to individual sections of the site.
New Craft category
Also on the search page, we broke out “dyes” from “natural materials” since we’ve had so much interest in dyes, dyestuffs, and dyeing. Thanks to Serenity and Anna for pulling these records apart from the stack.
New K-12 page
At the interactive workshop for teachers in May, we learned that teachers wanted their own K-12 page with lesson plans. They also told us that they wanted the lesson plans split out by grade level to make them easier to find. Take a look at the new lesson plan page at:
http://www.wcu.edu/craftrevival/k12/index.htm
We’ve also added links to related lesson plans developed by the Adventure of the American Mind project and new lesson plans that focus on Cherokee crafts.
New lesson plans
Please take a look at 7 new lesson plans. The Basket Game:A Lesson in Probability; Cultural Tic - Tac - Toe: A Native American Book Response; and Basket Designs:A Lesson in Math—three elementary grade lesson plans—were developed by Donna Beck and Jonnie Walkingstick of the Cherokee Elementary School. Four high school lesson plans were developed by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle and Evan Clapsaddle at Swain County High School. Access all from:
http://www.wcu.edu/craftrevival/k12/index.htm
Resource page
We’ve kept other resources on the Resource page for now. You can see them at:
http://www.wcu.edu/craftrevival/resources/index.html
New bio pages
There are two new biographies of Cherokee artisans up, telling the story of basket weavers Lottie Stamper
http://www.wcu.edu/craftrevival/people/Baskets_LottieStamper.html
and Agnes Welch.
http://www.wcu.edu/craftrevival/people/Baskets_AgnesWelch.html
About the Project
We’ve also gone back and re-vamped some of the earliest About the Project pages that were up on the site, including: Project Partners, Service Communities, and Project Teams, all accessible from:
http://www.wcu.edu/craftrevival/about/index.html
We’ve added maps so that visitors will have a better understanding of Craft Revival locations.
http://www.wcu.edu/craftrevival/about/heritagepartners.html
Weaving index
The Home Team is still working on a weaving index that will be similar to the Basket Pattern Index. The draft of this page can be seen at:
http://www.wcu.edu/craftrevival/crafts/weavingindex/
The basket pattern index is live and can be seen at:
http://www.wcu.edu/craftrevival/crafts/basketindex/index.html
Your comments are welcome.
Master image collection
We are finishing up with indexing all 4,000 individual image files that appear on the database. These are stored on gold-on-gold CDs and also on the project’s new terabyte drives. Thanks to Kate Carter for keeping up with these and to Joel and Robin Hitch for assisting with the drives.
NC Folklife Institute
A program director from the NC Folklife Institute in Durham paid a visit to the Hunter Library this month. The Institute is about to embark on digitizing their collection and looked to the Craft Revival as a possible model. Anna F spent the day with Sarah Bryan; she’ll pay them a visit in September. Besides helping to conceptualize how to think about their collection in preparation for digitization, we also discussed aspects of the NCFI collection that might dovetail nicely into the Craft Revival collection.
From the Hands of our Elders
Spinning off from the Craft Revival project is a related research project that focuses specifically on 20th century Cherokee crafts. Funded by two grants from the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, this project aims to fully document and digitize craft-related items in the collections of Qualla Arts and Crafts and the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. While the digitizing aspect of these projects overlaps with the Hunter’s ECHO grant, CPF had priorities not covered by the ECHO grant. These include: assisting the co-op with documenting their collection; creating fuller records of craft objects in the permanent collection; creating archival files for historic photographs; and developing new lesson plans (above).
Cherokee basketry book
While CPF supports the Hunter’s efforts to disseminate information via the website, they also wanted to be able to put information directly into the hands of teachers. With so much rich material, the intended booklet has grown into a book. The first in the series--Cherokee Basketry: From the Hands of our Elders—is scheduled to be out in October. Book chapters were read by representatives of Qualla Arts, the Cherokee Historical Association and professors in the WCU Cherokee Studies program.
Next newsletter
I will be sending out another newsletter at the end of September. At that time, we should know more about the direction we are headed. If you know of someone who would like to keep up with this project, please send me their email and I will add them to the list. If you’d like to be removed from this list, please reply. While the thermometer still reads like summer, campus is buzzing with students thinking about fall.
Anna
Hunter Library | Library Insider | Last updated: 8/26/2009 Joel Marchesoni