Week 10 - Discussion

This week Lisa and I met with Patrick at the site to discuss our Amazon wish list. We went over the quantities of items we wanted and provided brief descriptions of why we believed these items were necessary. We were set to discuss this with the president of the Seminole War Foundation, but he was unable to make it and sent a word document containing the list to him instead. 

Picture of our Amazon list

We were lucky to meet the women undertaking the book cataloging! Elaine and Erin (I believe) have been working hard to catalog the books at the site - all of which vary from Seminole historical fiction to very, very old birth and death logs. 

They described their work: making an excel spreadsheet, assigning Dewey Decimal numbers to all of the books, ordering supplies such as label covers and labels. They discussed their plan to formulate assembly lines to reorganize the books, make a shelf map, and create holding shelves for books that need to be processed. 

They also discussed their successes and failures - how difficult it has been to start the project, how daunting the process has been, and how frustrating the lack of organization has been. It was comforting to hear that they have struggled too! Lisa and I definitely felt the same sentiments in going through Laumer's documents. 

I am also pretty intrigued by their work - I work in the library system at Orange County Public Schools and learned a lot of technical information just based on their discussion, so that was very nice.

With the list settled and our files obtained, Lisa and I discussed our end project and what we want to do for it. We figured we would meet up in person during the event, so that it would be easier to collaborate live, and plan to start discussing the brass tacks of the project next week. Furthermore, we have established it will be reasonable to finish the first file cabinet during our internship. If we have the time, we will go for the second set of drawers, but given the time consuming process that is has been so far, it is unlikely. 

Lisa also updated our file that we are using to catalog the goods, and it looks incredible! I will continue working on transferring the information I have collected to it.