Community collections (SNCA presentation)

Recent presentation to the Society of North Carolina Archivists on community collaboration and outreach through our collections:

Preserving Local History/CBR wrapup

This post marks the formal end of our Preserving Local History project. Both Rachel Sanders and Megan Coker graduated in early May and are off to  graduate school pursuing library and information studies degrees; Rachel will be attending UNC Chapel Hill, and Megan is entering the USC in Columbia in the fall. We wish them well and the very best as they continue their studies  They really made our project possible and were wonderful representatives for UNCG out in the community, and a delight to work with. as well.

David Gwynn, Digital Projects Coordinator, at final CBR group presentation on April 24.

We participated in the final CBR group presentations on April 24, which included this PowerPoint presentation We also submitted our final report to the Office of Leadership and Service-Learning in May. For the project proper, one of our primary goals was to create a best practices manual. This publication brings together information we uncovered from our camera and equipment tests and from working out various procedures, and combines them in a short, hopefully readable, manual. As you will see there were both successes and challenges, most of which we overcame to our satisfaction. If you are interested in using a portable camera-based digitizing approach to capture and preserve your valuable historical materials, we hope you will find this helpful. It is possible that we will update it in the future, as we find other or better approaches to field-based digitization, so you might want to check back in the next year. If you have any questions whatsoever, please feel free to contact David Gwynn at jdgwynn@uncg.edu.

One additional item we would like to share, which took a lot of work on Rachel’s part, is a transcript of the team and community meeting conversations that occurred at the November 19, 2013 meeting held at College Place Methodist Church. This was a very useful and informative event and we were very appreciative of those who came to the meeting and shared information and concerns.

Finally, and most importantly, you will see on the UNCG Digital Collections website that we created a Community Collections section where we have placed the digitized material we did for College Place United Methodist Church. You will also note that we did some additional field scanning at Lindley Elementary School, First Presbyterian Church, and at West Market Street United Methodist Church. Several other organizations who attended the November 19 meeting at CPUMC expressed an interest in having us come out during the Spring to their locations. We sincerely apologize that we were not able to accommodate more of you, since we certainly value your institutions and your historical materials. We would love to do more, and in fact are hoping that we can continue this process in some form in the future.

This has been a great experience for us, for the University, and hopefully for the organizations that participated in our survey and meeting.

We hope to continue the community outreach in the future as we move forward toward creating a local history website that can accommodate a wide range of material from organizations and individuals throughout the city.

-  by Stephen Catlett

Preserving Local History Update

We have had some exciting developments with the Preserving Local History project since our last post. We finished our photography and scanning of the items at CPUMC and have proceeded with the next steps in our process. We sent out an online survey several weeks ago asking about the needs and wants of local organizations in terms of preservation and potential cooperation with other groups. We received quite a few responses and part of the process was a planned meeting with interested groups.

 

On Tuesday, November 19 we held a community meeting at College Place United Methodist Church. We invited those who had participated in our survey to come to CPUMC and learn more about our process, expectations, and progress so far on this project. We had a great response – close to twenty people from eight organizations attended the meeting! There were representatives from churches, schools, and neighborhood organizations, which is what we were hoping for. All of the members of our team came away from the meeting with a very good feeling about the direction that the project is going in. The representatives from the different groups had a lot of energy and questions, and we had a time of sharing where they could make recommendations to us as well as to one another. After the meeting – as part of our idea for an incentive to get better participation in our project – we held drawings for local charities. One of the five $50 donations went to the UNCG Spartan Food Pantry, which operates out of CPUMC.

We are still hoping to get more responses to our survey and to see which groups and organizations are interested in the possibility of sharing their materials and preserving them in a digital format. I will be making a lot of follow up calls in the months to come and doing some work with data to see what types of needs exist in the community and what can be done to help meet those needs. Next semester Megan, along with other team members, will be visiting organizations who expressed an interest in the team seeing their situation, which will include continued camera testing by digitizing two or three of their items. There are a lot of exciting opportunities coming our way.   

Preserving Local History Update (October 4, 2013)

The last three weeks have been exciting and enlightening for our team.  We’ve started the process of photographing some of CPUMC’s documents.  A big part of the process is setting up the tripod and camera that we’re using and making sure that it’s square so that it will be easier to crop and manipulate later. We have chosen several items to be photographed based on the requests of the staff at CPUMC and based on our own interests/curiosities, and they have proven to be perfect for our tests.  There are a variety of documents and photographs, and even some of the church’s building plans.  All of these items have to be treated with great care and need to be squared in the camera so that cropping them will be easier to do later on.  We have a chart on which Stephen is recording how long it takes us to record each item, the type of camera we’re using, and notes on what we’re liking about our process or what might make the process more efficient.  One of the bigger challenges that we are facing is with the larger items.  As you can see in the pictures here, the architectural elevations are oversize, and instead of laying them on the table, as we do with our small materials, we have devised a system for hanging the large items on a bulletin board and taking the pictures that way.  It was rough at first, but we finally have it figured out.

The reason that we’re so careful to record everything is that eventually we are going to create a best practices manual for groups that choose to participate in the project, which will give them advice and instructions on how to best preserve and record things of value.  The idea is to make the process as simple and inexpensive as possible for these groups, which is part of why we are testing several different models of cameras.  Right now we’re working with the small Sony camera, which has been great – there is a grid and an excellent auto-focus feature on this camera.  Later we’ll be testing other types, including an iPhone camera and a professional model.  All of this is in an effort to preserve their materials, and to hopefully create an easy way for groups to preserve as much as possible in order to make the materials accessible to everyone that the groups choose to share it with.
         
 This is promising to be an exciting project – keep watching for more details!

-Rachel Sanders-