This week Matt and I worked on the digital side of the Howard Project- He began working on renaming and organizing the photo files and I started the metadata! We had some issues uploading the TIFF and JPG files onto the hard drive, so when Matt opened them, it was a complete mess. I know he had planned on beginning the process of photoshopping the photos to remove any background noise/crop the photos correctly, but in the two hours we were working he didn’t even get through renaming each file. It’s always the projects that you think should only take a few minutes that actually take an impossibly long time and we were definitely reminded of that!
As for the Metadata, I started on the descriptions for each page. I used the metadata sheets from last semester as a reference and despite still being a little confused on the formatting, I tried to be as detailed as possible. It seemed pretty easy once I got the hang of it! I need to sit down at home and nail out a bunch of them because we have a lot of pages to write about and catch up on. I also need to figure out how to write in the subject portion of the metadata from the library of congress site. It seems like you have to search for them in the system on the website and I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for.
As I was writing the page descriptions, I realized how detailed even the more “mundane” pages of each scrapbook are. There are so many things to analyze and write about! On the cover of the 1947 scrapbook you can see the emblem for Orlando High School and shows a picture of the front of the school. There was also a phone number on the front of the book alongside the words “for Jim Turrisi.” I was actually curious about if the number was still in service so I texted it, which was promptly followed by another text from my service provider saying the number wasn’t in service. (Yes, I know the number was a landline number and that there was an extremely thin chance I would get any sort of response that way but I still wanted to test it out!) I’m assuming the Jim mentioned on the cover is the same Jim that’s pictured throughout the book so I wonder what his relation to Pat was! Additionally, the first page of the book had each member of “The Crowd’s” names written inside. I want to look back through the book and find each member of the friend group in the pictures that are included in the final pages. For the most part all of the labels are still visible and readable! I’ll have to get further into the metadata though before I go off on side quests like that.
-Kelsey R.