July 21st, 2021 - Xavier Grayce Walker - Blog Post #3
It is so surreal to be writing my third blog post for the summer!! Time has been moving like nobody's business, and it has been wonderful making so many memories during my last summer here as a Lafayette summer. Being halfway through our research time together and already completing or being well on our way to complete all of our goals for the summer is such a great feeling. In my role specifically I have loved being able to support. the team in their roles and hear during our team check ins and read on this blog how they feel about the work that we are doing together. With this being a student-led project, it has been super important to me that we keep a sense of autonomy and momentum with the project and camaraderie with each other, and hearing that we've been able to strike that balance with each other and folks are leaning into all of the possibility with what we have is really beautiful to me.
During my time since my last post I have been reviewing and giving a lot of feedback on the various documents folks have been working on, setting up appointments for us in Special Collections and with some administrators to go over our progress so far, and working on some more of the landing pages for the AAP site such as the Welcome page visible above.
I recently had a super great conversation with Sadè Evans '17 who is stepping into a co-director position of the McDonough Network. Through our conversation, Sadè shared with me that during her time at Lafayette students organized around the #MoreThanMizzou protests that happened during the Fall of 2015 and even submitted three documents, including a four-point list of demands, to the AAP. Next week I am excited to use these documents to test our collections form and metadata workflow that Jerri and Shirley have created for us, and then see how Saide incorporates this into her timeline of demands that she is currently working on. Next week I will also be working on getting us IRB approval, continuing work on our takedown forms, seeing if I can work out the kinks with changing the URL for both this site and the AAP site, and beginning a budget proposal for the fall semester.