This week was my last week with APS, but perhaps I’ll return in the future. I’ve been structuring these blogs by writing about what I did every day, but every day would essentially be the same report. This week was dedicated to finishing the Shreve and Related Families collection. I spent 19 hours there this week working on filling out the metadata spreadsheet, quality-checking all the images, and preparing the collection to be uploaded. I’m unsure when it will be added to the APS website, but they need to review my work and potentially make any edits.
On Thursday this week, I went out for coffee with Bayard and Sabina. We started our conversation going over the work I accomplished, and what the status of the project was. We also discussed the work flow guides they gave me, and if those helped or if they should make any edits to the documents. After that, we discussed my career goals and plans for the future. Both of them were supportive, offered advice, and told me about their backgrounds. Bayard asked if I would be willing to come back part-time in the future to continue working with the Rev City Project. I told him I’d be happy to, but I’d probably want to consider it during my final semester, as I have a lot going on this semester. He mentioned I was more than welcome to stay on working with the project, but right now they didn’t have the means to pay me and he’d rather me be compensated for my work so that waiting would be better anyway. Sabrina told me about some grants they are hoping to receive and that she would be in touch with me about any part-time or full-time digitization specialist positions that opened. Our conversation was great, and me optimistic about my future in the field.
I wrapped up this week with a check-in with Sabrina about finishing the metadata spreadsheet, and that the collection should be done, but needs to be reviewed still. I’m doing a blog post for APS that I have to work on, and I plan on sending it to Sabrina in a week or two. Sabrina gifted me a sticky notepad from this cool shop she told me about. We both shared our love for stationary, and I told her about the project I was working on dealing with sticky notes. This was a perfectly fitting and appreciated gift. Sabrina’s posted notes will be making an appearance on my project as I continue to work on it.
Thank you, Sabrina, Bayard, Joe, Bethany, Adrianna, and everyone else at APS who has helped me during my time there or has made me feel welcome. I loved my time there, and I truly felt like they valued me as a person and as a worker. I’m thankful for my experience, and perhaps I’ll be writing about more work with the APS in the future!
My time with APS is nearing a close, next week will be my last week there. I’ve enjoyed my time, and I’m thankful for the experience. I worked 19 hours this week, bringing me to 120 hours. I’ve been gathering my notes and thoughts to write a summary of my experience, which will come in the near future.
This week I started off on Monday working on my brown bag presentation. I wanted to use the scans from the previous week to finish it. I worked on that in the morning and then did some transcription work. I met with Sabrina in the afternoon to discuss the brown bag presentation and shared it with her. She added a few slides, and we discussed the ordering of the slides. I wasn’t sure if I should talk about my personal research interest or just the Rev City project, and she encouraged me to talk about my personal work as well. I presented on Tuesday, and honestly, I was nervous. I’m usually okay with doing presentations, but something about this one just had me feeling a bit anxious. I had to give the presentation over my lunch break at work, so perhaps that adds to it. Sabrina, Bayard, and Joe all complimented and congratulated me on Thursday when I saw them. I couldn’t ask to be working with a better group of people.
Thursday I spent the day working on transcription and preparing information on the Shreve collection. I was working on updating some of the information in the Excel spreadsheet, and some information about the historic background of the collection. I want to start adding some screen captures of some of the letters I’m transcribing. I’ll have to ask Sabrina if that’s okay, and then edit my posts from the previous weeks to have them.
Friday I worked with Sabrina on metadata. We had two fragile letters and 2 bookmarks we had to scan as well, so she showed me how to do that. We used the book scanner for these objects. I continued working on the metadata and started writing some abstracts on the documents. I’m hoping my last week will be fully focused on the collection and do my best to finish, or get close to fully processing it.
My time with APS is almost at a close. I’ve learned so much, but a mountain of training and knowledge remains in front of me. The two articles I’ll be discussing today I’ve read a few times over the week in preparation to collect my thoughts for this blog post. The abstracts they use at the beginning as helpful, but as someone new to the field I found myself taking notes on the terms that were being used such as MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging). Thankfully, the terms are explained in the text. The two articles I selected focus on access, and the archivist’s role in this.
Christopher J. Prom’s article, “Optimum Access? Processing in College and University Archives” is in conversation with the article from Greene and Meissner, “More Products, Less Process”. Prom says this should be required reading for every college or university archivist, and this article uses the Greene and Meissner article as a base and further develops questions that were left unanswered in regard to processing, arrangement, and description. The article is a study of how small, medium, and large repositories process, arrange, and describe collections and ultimately how much of their collection remains on backlog through these actions and how access is hindered in these processes. Prom concludes on four notes, that arrangement and description audits could help archivists and institutions respond to each situation based on staff size and skill to critique their standards and techniques are being applied. Secondly, archivists establish a reasonable amount of time to dedicate to a project and spend just that amount of time on it, as Prom says, “processing and describing to the clock” (23). Third, there should be a strategy that can be conducted by small teams, or a single person so that smaller organizations can move through their backlogs in a similar regard to larger organizations. Lastly, Prom states that the archival community should establish workflows and tools that should be tailored to the demand for efficient processing and description. Prom’s article was first published in 2008, and the landscape of online sources has changed since then, but there is still a wealth of information to be learned from this study.
Donald C. Force and Randy Smith’s article, “Context Lost: Digital Surrogates, Their Physical Counterparts, and the Metadata that is Keeping Them Apart” gripped me with just its name. Metadata is fascinating to me, it can both illuminate and cast shadows upon an object. The article highlights three reasons why archivists are digitizing archival materials, “first, to provide access to specific materials; second, to increase exposure to the archival institution and its holdings; and third, to prolong the original object materials through reduced usage.” This article is a study on metadata and the digitization of archival objects. The most fascinating thing to me was their argument about how archivists are unaware of how researchers will use the material, but how archivists lack the metadata knowledge to meet the needs of researchers. Digital objects can lose context as well, depending on how the person accesses the materials such as finding it through a search engine. The process of digitizing archival collections is essential, but this is still more to be done to create further access through metadata and to meet the needs of the community.
During my time with APS, I’ve read through their workflow documents and heard that term mentioned at least once a week. This is something Prom discusses, so it was interesting for me to see this connection. Prom mentions a standardizing of practice, and that even within institutions the process can differ. Using this, and drawing on the second article, I’m reminded of how APS’ digital library and the Rev City project are using metadata differently. The Rev City project has created new fields such as “lived experience” and is adding more metadata to archival materials that already existed on the APS library page. Sabrina did an interesting experiment with the stakeholders of the project where in which she asked them to read four documents and make metadata that they thought would be meaningful to someone trying to access the document. The metadata differing between people, and the things an archivist could miss or exclude for potentially a myriad of reasons or shortcomings is fascinating to me. For example, I’m currently transcribing a book of loyalist letters and one of the girl’s references toile. I know this as material culture, but it was spelled incorrectly and I was uncertain as to what it was. Bethany pointed out to me it was spelled wrong and what it was, but this is an example of something that could be missed by an archivist. I know APS is trying a new system of processing a collection that I’ve referenced before, and it’s moving quickly. The Prom article discusses how organizations create finding aids, or other inventory notes. The collection they’re doing it on already has a robust inventory listing with minor descriptions, which is allowing them to focus on digitization and metadata to make the materials able to be accessed sooner.
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.
I worked 14.5 hours last week at APS. This week I plan to work 20 hours, which means my hours would be complete in 3 weeks. Thankfully, my projects have been moving forward well, and I feel confident that my major work will be wrapped up before I finish.
On Monday I worked on a presentation I’ll be giving, and completed half of it. The second half will be about the Shreve collection I’m working on. I should be digitizing the collection on Monday, which will help me with the second half of my presentation. I also worked on transcription on Monday. Thursday I only came in for a short time for the all-staff lunch event. I spent time meeting people and socializing. I was planning to stay after the event to work more, but I had to go home and work on a rush report for work that was sent to me. Friday, I worked on transcription in the morning. In the afternoon I worked with Sabrina on the Shreve collection. We rehoused some items and continued updating the spreadsheet inventory. After this, I started working on the metadata. There is still more metadata to do, but it’s all a process I suppose. It’s been a lot of fun though.
This week I’m hoping to spend a lot of time with the Shreve collection to make good head way on that. I also have to finalize my notes for my presentation on the work I’ve been doing with APS.
I finished my fifth week with APS, and I’m about halfway finished my hours and time there. I currently have worked 67 of my 139 hours. This upcoming week I plan to work about 18-20 hours. My time with APS continues to be enlightening and fascinating. Every day I’ve been learning something new, honing skills, and enjoying every aspect of the position as the Levitt Fellow. I’m thankful for the opportunity!
On Monday I continued my work surveying the Shreve and family papers collection. Joe and Sabrina talked to me about the process they’ve been pioneering and testing to survey, process, and digitize a collection all at once. Both are excellent mentors who helped me understand how the process is still being refined in some ways and asked me to give any feedback from my experience with it. They gave me some papers to read about how they are doing it, and then I started following that with the Shreve and family papers collection. At the end of the day, I worked on transcribing to prepare to go over my work with Bethany on Thursday.
On Thursday I reviewed the notes Bethany added to my transcriptions, and we meet to discuss them. After going through it, Bethany had me read a few pages out loud to her and she would help me when I got stuck on a word. Being able to hear real-time feedback was great, and she would remind me to reflect on the person’s writing patterns and how that could help when being stuck on a word with deciphering letters. I did more transcription later as well. I joined a 3 pm career chat with Adrianna Link. She told us about her experience in the field, her life, and her educational background, and opened up to us about a lot of very honest experiences that I was grateful to hear about. On Friday I met with Sabrina in the morning to rehouse parts of the Shreve Collection. At this point, I had it fully inventoried and a baseline description of it. We rehoused documents into new folders and organized the papers chronologically. We kept the original inventory to maintain the organization that was previously established in an Excel spreadsheet and created a new tab for the up-to-date inventory listing that we just made. I started working on the advanced metadata for the collection. Once all of that is done, I believe we move on to digitizing it. I wrote some condition notes, and two of the objects have to go to conservation to have ribbons removed before we can digitize them. Sabrina told me I’d be giving a brown bag presentation about my work in about two weeks, so when I come in on Monday I’m going to start working on this presentation. I believe the presentation will be on Tuesday, August 1st, and I will most likely be presenting digitally because that’s my mandatory office day at Penn. I was also asked if I would be interested in writing a blog post in my last week about the project and my overall experience with APS for them, and I’m thrilled at the opportunity to do so!
Another fun and productive week with APS! My hope is to try to maintain around 18-21 hours over the next 3 weeks so that I can finish in 4 weeks. This way I can give myself a bit of a break between the end of my internship and the start of the school semester.
I’ve been finding some time during the summer to work on some personal projects that I’m very proud of. I wrote a paper for my seminar class entitled, “Flower Petals and Sticky Notes: South Korean Feminism”, which I want to continue to develop. My advisor, Dr. Motyl and my instructor Dr. Berman gave me excellent feedback and advice on ways to develop this further. I’ve done some reading summer reading, but haven’t written anything else to add to this. I translated some more sticky notes for another section I’d like to add, and started forming a more robust historiography mentally, but again haven’t put pen to paper (or fingers to keys) on it. Even though this hasn’t necessarily progressed, I wanted to share the small updates! I also worked with my Father In-Law to help translate a plaque for Gwangmojae, the Ancestral Shrine to Yi Won (1368-1429), the 11th generation of my partners family. I was honored to be asked to help with this, and it let me combine my affinity for public history and my growing interest in Korean translation work.
I discussed Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy during my first-week blog post with the American Philosophical Society. Some themes I took from this book that I wanted to explore through my internship are representation in the archive or lack thereof, community and community building, and accessibility. There are a few articles I’ll be discussing in relation to this, and I’ll be connecting this with the experiences I’ve had during my time at APS. I’ll conclude this with some additional articles I read and the personal struggles and emotions I’ve experienced while doing this work.
During my first year at Temple University, I read Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes. I’ve read this book twice and have talked about it on my blog before, but this book helped me frame my ideas on the violence the archive perpetrates in its inaction and the stories it represents and tells. The short article, “The Silence of the Archive” by David Thomas, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson is a brief discussion of longer chapters they have written on the subjects relating to this. Fowler puts forward the sentiment, ‘’sources and archives are neither neutral nor natural”, and this is because the information collected, curated, preserved, and presented have all been through the decisions of the archivist. Something Fowler discusses later is “catalogues” or “finding aids” and how they obscure records and peoples ability to find the information they’re searching for. As someone who doesn’t fully understand all the headings used by archivists, I understand that finding some objects will be difficult. This ties into my later point about accessibility, but Fowler puts forth that this is in some way silencing records as people won’t be able to find certain things on their own. During my time with APS, I’ve been working on transcribing the Loyalist Ladies Letter Book. Through this, I’ve transcribed over 40 pages of letters from a woman in 1771 to her parents, which has been fascinating to me to understand more of the everyday experience. I’ve been enjoying reading these letters, and there is a lot to say about them, as I’m especially interested in non-male and non-white experiences of the time, but class is another factor. She discusses with her parents the balls she is going to or all the money she spent on silk and asks her parents for more money. She also openly states that she went to someone’s house that was so rich and owned 25 slaves, which isn’t the word she used. I hope this project uncovers stories from marginalized communities, especially women of color, but I don’t know if I personally will get to be the one to uncover those stories which is disheartening.
The second point I want to discuss is community and community building. Nancy Y. McGovern’s article and SAA Presidential Address in 2017, “Archives, History, and Technology: Prologue and Possibilities for SAA and the Archival Community” reminded me of the work being done at APS. This article goes over the history of the profession of archiving, and the terms associated with it such as the first use of “born digital”. McGovern has a section on community and discusses how this word can have many different meanings. In my first blog post, I highlighted the community aspects of the Revolutionary City Project and how I wish it would be used to say more. Or my hopes for Philadelphians to be part of the community, and be able to identify with the work, and I hope that still is something that can and will be done. The community being cultivated currently matches the one aspect of community outlined by McGovern, this being professionals in the field and other institutions with similar interests. APS has stakeholders that they’ve partnered with for this project from diverse backgrounds and fields. One of the experiments Sabrina did with them was to give them four historic documents and asked them to create metadata for the object, keeping in mind what people with certain interests might use to find the document. I think this was a fascinating exercise to see how people may respond differently to the same objects. APS has partnered with other institutions as well to try to create a one-stop shop for American Revolutionary history in Philadelphia. In doing this, they’ve created a community of stakeholders, and partnered organizations. Hopefully, as the project continues to grow and become more accessible to users (an update to the website is actively being made to help this) the community will expand. I’m optimistic because I have confidence in the people working on the project.
I discussed accessibility briefly above, and I personally am of the mind that moving archives and collections online is overall a good decision for accessibility I understand how others may feel about it. Caitlin Patterson’s article, “Perceptions and Understandings of Archives in the Digital Age” is an interesting article that seeks to understand what people inside and outside the profession think about archives. This article is a fun read that I recommend, including a short section on stereotypes of the archives such as dust and socially isolated people. Patterson discusses how the digital age has led to people searching for information online, but not typically from archives. Most of the people surveyed in this article expressed the notion that an archivist’s job was, “ways to organize this information so that it can be easily accessed by the public”. This article discusses how an archive isn’t a homogeneous idea, and is fluid in nature. Reading it though, it reinforced my idea that digitization and presenting and making information accessible is at the heart of the work that archivists are doing. Coincidently for me, I happen to love digitization and I’m a proponent of making information accessible (and free) for the public. I was hoping to discuss this here, but I didn’t have time to learn about this new way of processing and digitalizing a collection that APS is doing. I should hopefully learn about it tomorrow and include it in my week 5 notes!
When I started working with APS, I started suffering from a bit of imposter syndrome. There were terms, such as the Library of Congress terms, and all sorts of information that I feared because I didn’t know and it made me uncomfortable. I continued doubting myself for about two weeks and had a small crisis of faith. After a few weeks though, I started to get over it and feel more comfortable in the work I was doing and it’s honestly because of the people at APS and the opportunity. I’m thankful that Temple I’m doing this internship, as it’s helped me realize I truly love the work I’m doing. Going beyond the in-the-field learning I’m getting from my time at APS, the career talks have been insightful. I discussed in my week 3 blog how wonderful it was to hear from Mary Grace and her experiences, and it brought up another contention in me. Archives, collections, or exhibit work? Mary Grace does both collections and exhibit work, and I think that would be something I’d enjoy the most. I guess I need to find another internship in collections and see if that holds true! I read a couple of articles that helped me with this as well. Those will be linked below as articles four and five.
This week at APS I worked for 12 hours, putting me to a total of 47 hours. Next week I’m working 19-20 hours, to make up for missing a day a few weeks ago. That being said, the original plan was to work 14 hours a week, for ten weeks. This is something I still may end up doing, but I may try to do extra hours across the weeks to get it down to 9 weeks.
On Thursday I started my day morning off doing transcription work of the Loyalist Ladies Letter Book. I transcribed about 8 pages. Later I was given an introduction to surveying a collection. The collection I’ll be working on relates to Israel Shreve and his descendants. I believe this collection was donated by his family. I was given a guide to read on how to survey the collection and spend the afternoon checking against the listed guide that all the objects were there. At the end of the day, there was the annual reading of the Declaration of Independence and a staff gathering. I spent some time socializing with other interns, staff members, and a friend I used to work at Eastern State Penitentiary with.
On Friday I again started my day with transcription. I did about 13 pages, and have around 42 pages done so far of the book. I wonder if I’ll be able to transcribe the whole book before I’m done. I continued surveying the collection and making notes in a spread sheet. There are other items I didn’t get to yet that weren’t in label folders because I want to ask about how we should be labeling/foldering them. I was told to preserve the original order of all the documents, so I’ve left them how I found them.
Next week I have a meeting to go over the transcriptions I’ve done so far. I also asked about the different method APS is using that Bayard and Sabrina mentioned, but there wasn’t enough time to go over this so Sabrina and I should be discussing it on Monday. She told me it’s something they’re doing with the Charles Thomas Jackson Papers, and that it’s her, Joe, and Bayard working with it. I’m excited to hear about how they are handling this collection differently. I’ll be posting my literature review soon, and in my post next week I’ll connect that writing to what I learn about the Charles Thomas Jackson processing procedure.
This week was a productive and fun week with APS. I worked 14 hours and should be working 12-14 hours this week as well. This week we are planning to start surveying a collection and starting the organizational process. I plan to ask about the way APS process their collections, and how they differ from other organizations. I’m going to make notes on my own from my readings and practicum on what appears different or similar to me, but I’d like to hear what someone with years of experience in the field thinks. I’ll be reading through some articles this weekend to see start my literature review and try to compare what is being said in these articles, and how the process will be done with APS.
On Thursday I started my morning off by going over the metadata exercise from the week before. I was unaware these documents have already been posted online, so we compared the metadata I collected to the metadata that is on the Rev City Portal. After this, I worked on creating metadata for the John Leacock commonplace book that I scanned my first week. I was reading through the book and pulling out information that I felt would help researchers and using Library of Congress headings. I met with Bethany at 2pm to go over transcription, and how APS handles their transcription work. I don’t have any formal training in this, but I’ve had a lot of experience transcribing historic documents and it’s something I enjoy. Bethany told me that Penn used to offer free classes on how to conduct historic transcription and I’ll have to see if that’s still available or something I’d like to take for a certificate. We sat together and she had me read through historic documents out loud and we would discuss when I got stuck on a word. She reminded me to use clues to letters or words from previous examples, such as how someone’s commas are done or how they write their I’s, etc. This was a lot of fun for me and felt like solving a puzzle. Bethany was an incredible teacher and I’m thankful for her taking the time to sit with me. At 3 pm I met Mary Grace Wahl, who is the Associate Director of Collections and Exhibits. She told us about her life and her experiences, from her schooling and start in the field, to the last 15 years she’s been with APS. It was great listening to her speak, and honestly enlightening. I’ve been having a hard time trying to figure out exactly what I’d like to do after I graduate, and archives are something I enjoy and would be happy to do, but it was nice to know there’s something else I’d enjoy. The way Mary Grace spoke about her work experience and what she does normally drew me to the idea of working in collections and exhibit design. Hopefully, the Temple food truck exhibit does go through with the library because I’d love to get some first-hand experience with exhibit design. I asked Mary Grace at the end of her talk about what she anticipates the field would be like for someone looking for a job in collections and she was open and honest about her belief that there will be entry-level opportunities in Philadelphia and discussed the difference in working with large and small organizations. She asked us all to keep in touch, and I followed up with her after the talk to thank her and express my gratitude for her sharing her story with us. She told me about positioning their posting this week for an exhibit assistant, which I’ll be sharing with a friend when it’s posted. Sabrina told me about archivesgigs as a job board to use to search for positions as well.
Friday was transcription and finishing metadata on the John Leacock commonplace book. I finished reading this book and put together all the metadata I could think of, and Sabrina and I will have to review it together at some point before the book is uploaded to the portal. I also transcribed 20 pages of letters from A. Swift to her Mother and Father. As Bethany said on Thursday to me, the writing really hasn’t changed much since the American Revolution. I found the letters easy to read and interesting. I followed the guides that were set for me and enjoyed my time transcribing them. They’re from a book that is on the portal now, but they want to have a transcription of the contents for finding aids as well as making it more accessible and easier to use for anyone that wants to view them. The transcriptions are meant to be paired directly with the letters and can be followed from line to line to help anyone who wants to read them. I was surprised by how much I was able to transcribe in the hours I worked on it. I wonder if I will be transcribing the full book during my time with APS. Sabrina mentioned that it could be something placed on the backburner for when I need something to do, or when I feel like just working on transcription instead of jumping into a new project. Anyway, this was a great week with a lot of learning. My time with APS so far has been incredible, and everyone is beyond kind and supportive. My total hours so far are 35, which is a little behind where I want to be. With the fiscal year coming to a close and us switching to a new database at Penn, I’ve been very busy there. As well as holidays limiting the days in which I can be at APS. Thankfully, that all has come to pass. My hope is to maintain a minimum of 14 hours a week and try to get to 19 hours a week potentially every week, or every other. I’m going to take some time this week or weekend to map out the specific days and hours I want to work, and how that fits with my work at Penn.
For my second week at APS I worked 7 hours, which puts me behind on hours to make up, but I have my schedule planned for what days I need to work to finish my hours there. I started my day by reading the manuscript handling document to prepare for my task of formulating metadata. Sabrina went through a PowerPoint with me that reviewed the Rev City project, and how APS organizes their metadata.
I was assigned four documents to organize the metadata on to practice conducting this kind of work. We will be reviewing these this week. I was also shown how Rev City has made new fields for their metadata compared to APS’s online website, such as themes to organize the objects. I enjoyed this work and it was something that I found to be exciting. I saw a job posting today from the Philadelphia Museum of Art that directly references metadata, so I’m happy I’m learning this skill with APS. Sabrina also showed me how she had to adjust and create metadata for the objects in the Rev City project that came from APS, and other partnering organizations to fit how the Rev City project is set up.
This week we will be reviewing the metadata I made the week before, and I should be starting to work on transcriptions. This is something I have a lot of experience in, as I did this when I worked with Eastern State Penitentiary and as a research assistant for Dr. Dack at Rowan University. That being said, I enjoy transcription and I’m looking forward to doing that this week.