Newsletter: October 2007
Year III Partnership
At our October meeting, we formally welcomed Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, a Cherokee cooperative that was established at the tail end of the Craft Revival period. Anna is working with Qualla Director, Vicki Ledford and student Tonya Carroll to identify basket patterns. Pattern names, like those used for coverlets, evolved from the makers themselves. The basket patterns will be added to the website this spring.
Web uploads
Now that there are a significant number of items in the database, Anna is more able to construct pages with lots of links, making the story pages more dynamic. The three primary landing pages—The Story, The People, The Crafts—have been re-written and the navigation re-worked. There are also new bio and crafts pages up, accessible from each of the landing pages.
Partner contributions
George and Melissa have completed a train section that illustrates the look of the region during the time period of the Revival. This dynamic section includes historical text and postcards, selected stop-by-stop along a stretch of railway that linked Asheville to Murphy. Travel by Train is accessible from The Story. The Mountain Heritage Center recently contributed text from Irons in the Fire, an exhibition catalog that includes blacksmithing techniques. Ironwork links off of The Crafts portal. The Guild has contributed a series of Glossaries that explain vocabulary used in various craft media. These are also available from The Crafts. Two other HP contributions are in the works. Michelle is working on Penland’s Weaving Institutes and Campbell is contributing a 1990 interviews with Brasstown Carvers, transcribed by Anna Shearhouse.
Resources
Anna is working with Teacher Liaison, Mary Jean Herzog, to complete the Lesson Plans section of the website. Previous lesson plans have undergone a thorough review process. Mary Jean reworked these with input from the HL Editorial Committee and Learn NC. New lesson plans have also come in and are beginning the review process. Anna and graduate assistant Jason Woolf completed annotations for the lengthy Bibliography. The Resources section was begun in Year I and is now complete and uploaded to the site.
Collection portal
A fourth—The Collections—portal is not yet ready, but we are constructing the information that goes behind it. Melissa has completed a re-vamp of the database landing page, so that it more closely resembles the overall design of the site. Our usability testing indicated that, before the re-vamp, users thought that they may have left the site. Ginny is working on Collecting Guides (finding aids) with the Partners.
Database remediation
Ginny has been going through the prior contributions to the database, image-by-image, and redrafting metadata descriptions and item titles. She has also re-worked the training manual instructions for submitting metadata. Melissa has changed the quirky files names that appeared in compound objects. Now instead of having to click through Content dm ID numbers—like SHCG_259_A, SHCG_260_A, and SHCG_261_A—you click through “page 1,” “page 2,” and “page 3.” Ginny has completed and uploaded Penland’s items. The Folk School’s is almost done and the Mountain Heritage Center, with fewer items to rework, will be finished by the end of November. Anna is fact-checking descriptive data and Tim is checking terms against the LC Authority files. Joe, our undergrad assistant, cropped the black lines off of 600 (!) master images and has re-created Access and Thumbnail images. Melissa is loading these into the database as time permits.
Hunter’s Home Team
Over the past two years the project suffered from not having enough staff and especially not having someone overseeing metadata consistently. Just as we got our Metadata Librarian on board, he resigned, and we were back to ground zero. With the start of Year III, we were in a critical state. Re-building the Home Team with the addition of a Project Archivist and a Metadata Librarian is having a huge impact on the project. Tim Carstens, head of Cataloging at the Hunter, is now working on the project in the role of Metadata Librarian. With 20 years of cataloging experience, Tim has risen to the challenge of learning the project while learning Content dm and has successfully uploaded his first batch of HP contributions. Melissa has trained Tim and Ginny on the use of Content dm. Ginny brings years of experience working on digital projects and archival description. Her re-working of HP contributions is bringing consistency to the database.
Hindsight is 20/20
O, if I had a dollar for every time this phrase has been uttered during our Home Team meetings! We have learned so much from this project and this process. While we embraced the concept of capacity building on behalf of our Partners, we did not realize the fact that the capacity of Hunter Library is also enhanced by the challenge of building the functionality and structure necessary for major in-house digital projects. At this point, the Home Team remains focused on three tasks: 1/improving previous contributions, 2/establishing a stricter vetting process for incoming contributions, and 3/forward planning for the completion of the project.
Year IV
Given that we had to back-pedal for half a year, the project is applying for a fourth year of funding from the State Library. We will use Year IV to complete the work outlined in the project’s original application, that is, 1/complete target numbers originally estimated by HPs, 2/begin work with the Cherokee Museum, 3/complete the rest of Qualla’s collection, and 4/develop the web-based Cherokee story.
Advisory Meeting
We welcome back our Advisors who will meet along with Partners at our fall 2007 Advisory meeting. We will be in touch to set this up.
Anna
Hunter Library | Library Insider | Last updated: 11/2/07 Melissa Young