Friday, March 1, 2013

Digitizing history and continual inventorying!

This week I continued work on The Center collection. I have about three boxes left to inventory. I should note that I've been saying "processing" when in all actuality I've been taking a detailed inventory of each collection. The only collection I will hopefully fully process is the Brian Arbogast Collection, and that is because I will be rehousing the whole collection as well. Most of the work I've been doing with the other collections is making it easier for the next intern to pick up where I leave off so that they can better process the collection.

With that being said, I suppose I should inform you all as to what all I was up to this week. Well on Tuesday I met with David Bain whom is responsible for pretty much all the technological aspects of the museum. Ie. the online museum. We discussed the efforts made by the museum to digitize the collection. We discussed things such as the efforts to scan in all the publications and "tag" them with all the headlines from each issue, thus making it searchable. One of the things I really found interesting was he makes it a point to extensively tag articles dealing with political figures and their views on GLBT rights. He hopes that by doing so, people who do their research on voting for political figures will be able to see both past and present views. This way people can be educated voters.

Another thing we talked about was the fact that there are thousands of photos that had been uploaded to a yahoo group site. Unfortunately though, this site is not compatible with recent technology anymore. As a consequence all these photos will be lost. This is unfortunately a problem within the Public History realm. When creating a digital component to a museum, one must consider the longevity of the technology they are using. Not only must one consider the longevity, but they must also consider the compatibility with future technology.

Thursday I finished up inventorying box 6 of 9 Center boxes. It has been interesting going through these items, mostly because I did not know just how extensive the history of The Center was. It started off as the Gay and Lesbian Community Services, and eventually ended up as The Center. They also issued a monthly newsletter called The Triangle. It has been most interesting coming across this stuff simply because I had forgotten what it was like to create a news letter in the "olden days." We are talking about having templates that you stick pictures and what not on, and then having to send it off to a publisher! It reminded me of when I was in high school and I was pretty much the only one on the yearbook committee one year. It was left to me to cut the pictures and glue stick them onto pre-printed templates. What a task! It is simply amazing how much technology has changed in just 10-15 years! Everything is done with computer programs now, and with a click and a drag, you've got your published work!

This Saturday I will be attending a History Harvest up at the Sanford Public History Museum. I hope to learn more about overall efforts and techniques to digitize history. Next week I will be technically on Spring break. However, I will be at the University continuing work on my internship, as I will be missing about a week in April due to a wedding I have to attend in San Diego. My partner's sister is getting married to her partner, so it is kind of relevant don't you think?

Until next week,

-Kyle the intern

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