Search This Blog

September 22, 2011

Today I completed to outline for my grant. I will begin typing the grant tomorrow. There was a staff meeting today where we hammered out the final details of the Back-to-School with The HistoryMakers event. This event should be amazing!

September 21, 2011

Event #2 was today! Teacher Appreciation with the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. There were about 20 teachers in attendance. The executive director took the teachers on a tour of the facility that was similar to the tour we take children on. The goal of the event was to convey to the teachers how the MCLM is a wonderful institution to bring their classes for field trips.

This event was basically outreach, a very important function in any library, museum or archive. Especially those that are new, like the MCLM.

September 20, 2011

Today I pulled primary and secondary sources for and exhibit the MCLM is putting together for local teachers. The primary sources at the MCLM are amazing! I pulled slave registers,Tuskegee airmen coin, and a letter dating from the 1700's.

Today I also typed didactics for pieces of ephemera displayed in the museum.

September 16,2011

Continued working on the NEH grant today. I also gave my first tour of the facility and the exhibit! One tour was family that heard about the MCLM through a recommendation and the other tour was a woman who was an avid collector of African American ephemera. The woman is interested in becoming a volunteer. Volunteers are very important to the MCLM, especially volunteers with knowledge of African American items.

This week I began to understand the amount of preparation that is required to attain donations. The institution has to constantly be in contact with the donor to guarantee that the items will be given to them.

September 15, 2011

Today I was apart of my first event at the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, Happy Hour at the Museum . The Director of Collections, Leah, invited some of her closest friends to the museum for cocktails and a tour. It was a success! About 20 people attended and the museum received donations.

September 14, 2011

Today I continued to work on the NEH grant. The topic has changed a bit, the grant will now focus on funding a symposium to discuss cloud computing and its' application to archival management. Currently, I am talking to the archivist at Sony as a possible participant in this symposium.

I also attended a workshop hosted by LAasSubject discussing how to utilize social media to promote archives. It was very informative, I learned about a great site called paper.lihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif This site produces a news paper out of a personal Twitter feed. Neat!

Septemeber 13, 2011

Read the NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant outline. My proposal is due September 27th. This grant opportunity is amazing, they provide funding just to begin planning. This is the perfect opportunity for the MCLM that has many plans in the works!

Here's a sample of the abstract "The Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum’s will use the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to migrate digital administrative documents at the end of their life-cycle into a cloud computing system." It's a new idea, it's edgy, it's going to be great!

September 10, 2011

Continued cataloging today and then shelved books. The MCLM book collection is a closed collection like most (if not all) rare book collections. I also had the chance to meet more of the volunteers that allow the library to run so smoothly.

I began to research cloud computing and how it works. It's a simple concept, basically there is a "cloud" of servers that hosts the information that users access remotely through the internet. The cloud that I will be implementing will only be accessible through the computers available at the MCLM.

September 9, 2011

Today I was able to complete the cataloging process for a number of rare books. After a LOC number is pulled the subject and name authorities are added into the Star Quadra database. The subjects are taken from the LOC online catalog. Each subject is added to maintain the controlled vocabulary at the MCLM. After the subject and name authorities have been updated the book is ready to be entered as an item into the the Star Quadra Client. The database is easy to navigate and I haven't had too many issues quickly learning it's ins and outs.

I also continued working on the MOAD condition reports; updating the digital files to reflect the paper files. I also updated the written agreement to the MOAD about how the items are to be displayed once in their position.

September 8, 2011

Today primarily consisted of putting together condition reports for the 24 items that the MCLM is loaning to The Museum of African Diaspora.

Condition reports act as a statement for the lending institution detailing what condition the item was in prior to transportation to the recipient institution. In addition to the condition of the item the current selling price of the item must be determined. To determine the selling price of the item I consulted Ebay, Heritage Auctions and other applicable websites.

September 7, 2011

Today there was a staff meeting where we discussed the use of cloud computing in archival management. This is a innovative use of current technology in application to archival management. The NEH and IMLS have an ample amount of funding available for institutions that are willing to implement creative and new uses of technology in the humanities. My role in all of this is to write the grant and figure out how to organize archival items in a cloud. I am not aware of many archives putting there digital items into a cloud of servers and I look forward to the MCLM being one of the first to do so.

I have so many ideas about how to organize the files in the server in a manner that would reflect the current organizational schema being used at the MCLM. More information to come!

Question of the day: Are you privy to any institutions that use a cloud, instead of a database, to organize there digital objects?

September 6, 2011(First Day!)

Today I met the staff at the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum [MCLM] and went on a brief tour of the facilities. After the tour concluded I began cataloging rare books.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif The first step of the cataloging prochttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifess is to pull a Library of Congress call number from the Library on Congress Online Catalog. The process can take much longer than realized for rare books, some of which are so obscure the LOC has to record of them.

If the book has no record in the LOC the next step is to search World Cat for a possible call number. To verify a call number applies to the book the number of pages and the size of the book is compared to the record.