Faculty Files Finished

As the semester ends we just finished all 13 boxes of faculty files that came to us from Communications at the beginning.  They are all processed and entered into Archivists Toolkit.  It has been great to have that networked so my students could input the data as they went.  Of course I still need to fill in the rest of the information.

I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the time to do subject tracing on each faculty member, or if time wise in makes more sense to depend on Ctrl-F to find a name in the Finding Aid.  If I decide to do it “right” the finding aid may never get finished.  Ponder, ponder.

A big thanks to my studentworkers for a very long job, well done.  Julius Ferraro and Pete Murphy will graduating at the end of term, so huzzah to them both.  Also working on this project were Tiffany Bennett, Kate Schuster, Roger Arnold and Betsy Dingman.  We would never get anywhere with out their help!!

Fact checking Colleges’ history

The Colleges are putting up a new website, with an updated history. They have asked me to fact check the whole page. Interesting the things “we all know” but I have a hard time putting my finger on how we know it. I am learning a lot as I go, which is always a treat.

I hope everyone has a nice holiday tomorrow!

Social Networking AND Photo digitization

Lone Arrangers of SAA now has a group on Facebook!

I posted on the discussion board asking about batch processing in Photoshop and learned, right away, from Florence Paisley that it was possible.  That got me started searching help again and I figured it out!!

Thank you, Florence

Thank you, LoneArrangers

Thank you, Facebook

Photo digitization, again

Well, I’ve worked out the procedure for automating the resizing of photos for the OPAC and for thumbnails. I was hoping that I could do the “save as. jpg” and “save as _t.jpg” as well, but apparently you can’t automate “save as.” My other dashed hope was to select a whole folder of images to resize at one time. It seems they still have to be done one by one.

I’ve done three disks so far. The first I worked out the bugs, the second I wrote up the procedure while I did it, the third I followed the written procedure. I think I’m good to go. I’ll add the page to my “Archives Manual.”

If any of you have hints on streamlining this process, I’d love to hear them!

Arrrchivists!

I just joined an archivist group on Facebook.

Arrrchivists!

Description: “Ahoy, me hearties! Join forces under the Jolly Roger with the pirate archivists. If anyone messes with you, plop down a box of unprocessed papers and exclaim “There! That’s what I think of ye. Before an hour’s out, I’ll process your correspondence like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour’s out, ye’ll research upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”

 Sounds like my kind of group!

Social Networking

Today the Irreverent Archivist was talking about social networking (http://irreverentarchivist.blogspot.com/2007/11/is-this-21st-century.html) and I wanted to put in my 2 cents.

I’ve been experimenting with Facebook.com. It has proven to be a great way to relate to my student workers and colleagues here at the library and within the region.  I admit we are using it to exchange pictures, book and movie recommendations and challege each other to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” trivia contests.  But I believe it could easily be used to exchange information on a professional level as well.  If you are interested in trying it out you can ask to me my friend (Linda Clark Benedict).  I’d love to “meet” you.

The other tool I’m experimenting with is instant messaging.  I’ve signed up with Meebo.com which will read messages from other applications.  (Yahoo, AOL, Jabber…) You have to know people’s addresses to add them to your contacts.  I’ve added a couple of archivists in my region, but often they forget to login.  A couple of days ago I was IMing with an archivist who is 1.5 hrs drive from here, to try and troubleshoot a problem she was having with Archivists Toolkit.  We didn’t fix the problem, but at least we defined it.

Display cases on photo digitization

We decided to do the display cases this month documenting the process we go through to  take our photos from the filing cabinets, to the Voyager catalog.  I took some snaps to show off the process.

Here is Kate Schuster preparing photos for scanning.

And Jessica Julius scanning.

Archives needs

I forgot to add the need for environmental control.  I’ve been tracking and when they turned on the heat the humidity dropped from an average of 65% to an average of 35%.  Not good.