Newsletter: March 2007
Year III Grant Application
Consistent with “March Madness” the Craft Revival project madly moved forward with its Year III grant application. Always a lot to pull together, this year’s application was complex: an accounting of Year I, a projection as to what we’ll finish in Year II, and a plan for Year III. The grant is complete, copied, and was mailed in on time. We received notice from the State Library that it is safely in their hands. If anyone would like to review the grant, please refer to the project’s pages on the Hunter Library website (from WCU site › Library › About the Library › Library Insider › Craft Revival).
Appalachian Studies Conference
Our project was presented at this year’s Appalachian Studies Conference, which was held on the campus of Maryville College. Three of us presented in a session titled Preserving the Craft Revival. Tim Glotzbach, Dean of the Kentucky School of Craft presented his work in creating a craft school on the site of the former Hindmen Settlement School in Rich Traditions—Contemporary Hands in Kentucky. Anne Bridges, Librarian with the University of Tennessee Libraries, presented on a joint IMLS project with Arrowmont School in Tennessee Arts and Crafts: Preserving and Making Accessible the Past. I chaired this session and presented Documentation and Interpretation: North Carolina’s Craft Revival, focusing on our project. I think it goes without saying that the Appalachian Studies community is an important audience for our work.
Collaboration
I might make mention of a meeting I had at the Appalachian Studies conference. I talked with Shannon Wilson, University Archivist and Head of Special Collections at Berea about our project. Some of you may know that Berea has very extensive archive on material related to the Craft Revival. Their holdings include the records of Berea College’s early attempts at reviving coverlet weaving, which included their acceptance of woven articles as payment for tuition; college President Frost’s articulation of the region and its culture in articles in the Berea Quarterly, records of their own Fireside Industries (where Lucy Morgan learned to weave), records of the Council of Southern Mountain Workers (where the Guild was officially formed); copies of the periodical Mountain Life & Work, which carried many articles and notices relevant to the Revival. They also have a major Doris Ulmann collection. Shannon is interested in talking further about a possible collaboration.
Website additions
Heritage Partners George Frizzell and Michelle Francis are working with Melissa Young to draft content for new web pages. George is working on a contextual scene to convey what the region looked like before and during the Revival. Michelle has written short bios of lots of Penland-related folks who posed for a period photograph at the school. Their bios will pop-up when the viewer clicks on their image. The Mountain Heritage Center is working on getting the first of our video images on the site. They are testing out their process with artifacts on hand and will later input Revival-related artifacts, including the setting up of a loom and an interview with Bea Hensley. David Brose has sent in some moving images as well and Melissa is working through the technical issues with WCU Information Technology staff. We hope to see the product of these efforts very soon.
Finding aids
We are interested in having a few finding aids up on the website. I am going to try to make it around one more time to each site for a one-to-one meeting with Heritage Partners. We can talk more about appropriate finding aids at that time. Until then, anyone wanting to upload a finding aid, do go forward with scanning and creating metadata.
Interstate-26 Display
The Craft Revival will be featured at the Welcome Center on I-26 on the Tennessee-NC state line. I have just begun thinking about elements to include in the display and, again, this can be another focus of an on-site meeting with HPs. We have lots of space and can use larger items. The cases are locked so security is not an issue. David Brose reported good response when the Campbell Folk School participated in one of these displays last year.
Posters and mailings
The students have worked together to mail out hundreds of posters to cultural sites and schools throughout the region. Next month I’ll have a report on where these were sent and I hope we’ll soon see the results in terms of hits to the site. If anyone wants posters, we can mail those to you unfolded in a tube. Please let me know.
Usability Study
I have been in touch with mStoner, the university’s web contractor. They are planning to conduct usability testing on two main groups of users: college students and the general public. They will also work one-on-one with our Teacher Advisory Group to test the usability of the site for teachers. We hope that we can make significant improvements to maximize the use of the site as a resource.
Teacher Advisory
With the end of the year upon us, it is not an easy task to schedule a final meeting with our teacher Advisory. Teacher Liaison Mary Jean Herzog is working with teachers to find a date that will work for most of our teachers. We hope to engage them in an experiential exercise to fuel their interest in the project and want to tap their expertise in helping us create a product that will be usable to teachers across the state.
Advisory Meeting
You will be contacted soon as we are planning our final year-end meeting. We may just get to that conversation about the future.
Anna
Hunter Library | Library Insider | Last updated: 4/3/07 Melissa Young