Okay, so I was definitely overambitious with my last blog post. I ran into a huge roadblock while working on metadata creation. Namely, I don’t have contextual information for a lot of the digitized photos, and I don’t feel comfortable trying to describe all the photos using my limited knowledge of ABC history alone. So, the team took a trip to Special Collections this week that was super helpful! I spent most of my time during the visit looking through the original physical copies of the digitized photos and trying to find any identifying information. This was really difficult, because not all the photos were digitized, so I had to do a lot of searching on my own. Additionally, while some of the photos contained context regarding the relevant event or people on the back, most of them did not, so this was very frustrating.

One of the biggest obstacles came in trying to identify this student:



Elaine Stomber, the college archivist, helped me tentatively identify the student as Frederick Strickland ‘69. However, while looking through the 1969 Melange in an attempt to confirm this, I couldn’t find Strickland’s photo. Elaine suggested that Strickland might not have taken a senior photo, as this was common during the time period, and that she will try to confirm that this is Strickland by looking through some other resources.

One thing I definitely learned from this experience is that when digitizing items, we should be more diligent about collecting as much contextual information as we can from the get-go in order to avoid mishaps like this in the future. For now though, I am glad we cleared up confusion about some of the photos.

Wow, I can’t believe this summer is ending so soon! It feels like just last week I was still struggling to come up with the metadata workflow. I can’t wait to see what the team accomplishes before my next blog post.