July 5th, 2021 - Shirley Liu - Blog Post #1
I am very excited to be participating in the ABC Archives Project as a member of the Collection Growth and Development team. Under this position, I help to manage the collection and organization of images, documents, and objects that are submitted to the project. I first started this work during the spring semester by deciding what metadata should be attributed to digital files that are submitted to the project. I imagine that this sort of work—metadata creation and developing a workflow (basically an instruction guide) of how metadata should be created—will comprise most of what I do with AAP this summer.
Although last semester was my first time formally working with AAP, I have been interested in the history of ABC on campus since there was an exhibition about the Rapped in Black admissions pamphlets in the library during the spring of my freshman year. I wrote an article for The Lafayette about the exhibit where I got to interview Xavier, who had been the historian of ABC at the time. I found myself really interested in learning more about the subject, as well as becoming a part of the team that would help preserve this knowledge for future generations, which is why I applied to work for AAP over the summer.
I’m really excited to have a solid metadata workflow by the end of the summer, as well as to have metadata for a good chunk of archival objects. I want to learn more about the history of ABC in general; luckily, this is something I accomplish anytime I do work on the project. Today, for instance, I worked on renaming digitized items that are a part of the project collection, which required me to look at some of the items in close detail. So, for instance, it was really cool to read old articles from The Lafayette newspaper about ABC while they were first voicing their Black Manifesto and Five Demands.
Other things I did today included writing up some best practices and tips for renaming digital files (for people who will work on the project after me) and creating metadata for a few images. Next, I’d like to finish renaming the files in the Google Drive, as well as clean the Drive up a little by deleting redundant files, and continue creating metadata for certain archival items. Today is the 5th of July, so the AAP team did not meet up for our usual Monday meeting. However, I look forward to meeting with the team on Wednesday to see what everyone else has been up to!