I worked 20.5 hours this week at APS, which brings me to a total of 102 hours. I’m nearing the end of my time, but I’m feeling great about my work. I have two more weeks left with APS. Next week I will be working on my brown bag Monday, and presenting it on Tuesday. I will most likely be working on the Shreve collection and transcription on Thursday and Friday. I have a meeting with Sabrina and Bayard either this week or my final week to discuss my work and the project moving forward.
Monday I was working on putting together my brown bag presentation. I put together the first half of it and will finish it Monday at work. I was waiting until I digitized the Shreve collection to finish the other half of my presentation, as I wanted to use images of the documents for my presentation. I also worked on transcription on Monday. I renamed some of the folders the objects were in, and kept working on metadata.
Thursday I met with Sabrina in the morning at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. We were looking at documents from a few Quaker families before, during, and after the American Revolutionary War. Our hope was to find what documents could contribute to the Rev City project. We went through a cart of documents that Sabrina had asked for for the day and made notes on what documents we wanted, how many pages they were, and what equipment would be needed to digitize them. From my understanding, APS has a flatbed scanner at HSP that they can use, but would need to schedule time with HSP to use their book scanner. We walked back to APS and had a great conversation about career goals, and a general discussion of life. It was nice. I did some transcription while Sabrina was at lunch and wrote a short description for my presentation so that a blurb could be emailed out for it. That afternoon I worked on digitizing some of the Shreve documents on the flatbed with Sabrina.
Friday I finished digitizing the documents on the flatbed that I could do by myself. Sabrina was away for the day, and there are two letters and two bookmarks that I didn’t scan, as Sabrina and I will have to do them together because they are fragile and there are some conservation concerns. I worked on transcription the rest of the morning. In the afternoon I worked with Joe to use the book scanner. We scanned a large broadside, the Shreve journal, and the Shreve Family Letters book. Joe was there to help me and give me tips on how to use the book scanner. Overall, I digitized just under 700 pages this week, or perhaps a touch-over. I’ll have to review the public drive at APS to get the exact number.
This week was a lot of fun! I really enjoy digitizing documents. Besides the joy of the process itself, it’s exciting to know the work I’m doing is allowing people to access this fascinating information. One of the things I noticed when working on metadata for the Shreve Family Letters book is how Israel Shreve always told his wife what he was doing, and where he was during his service in the Continental Army. An interesting project could be mapping all the locations he was at, and creating a map with dates showing his movements throughout the war. At the end of the book, there are soldiers’ names listed and the troop they were with as well. I’m sure genealogy people would like to see that. I plan to work about 19 hours this week, which would bring me to 121 hours.