The 8th week of my internship was my most enjoyable week by far! I got to use my knowledge of the database to work on new skills as well as hone other ones. From skeletal metadata, to searching for documents, to improving in transcription, this was an educational and productive week.
Early in the week I finished up some skeletal metadata entry concerning to the number of images in each Teams files folder. This work was quite tedious but wasn’t too taxing on my mind. Thankfully, me and Astrid seem to have completed most of, if not all, of the skeletal metadata for the AFSt collection!
Most of my week consisted of trying to update the document tracker. We were given a list of documents that were unaccounted for, and we had the job of going in and putting them in a spreadsheet that would be folded into the official PRINT document tracker. Many of these documents were simply left off, and it was quite easy to add the data of these documents to the spreadsheet. All that consisted of was taking the document metadata from a spreadsheet and the Endnote entry and entering it into the document tracker temporary spreadsheet.
Despite this easy start, complications quickly arose as there were quite a few document IDs that did not appear in the endnote and archival metadata. For these, I developed a method to track down the correct metadata. I began by searching for only a few letters and digits included in the document ID. For example, while searching for document AFSt-H_D_85_34-74_85-86, I would only put the digits 85-86 in the Endnote search engine rather than the entire ID. This led me to a document called AFSt-H_D_85-86. My next step would be pulling up the source documents from the folder on the Teams. The images I found matched the metadata for AFST-H_D_85-86 completely, and after searching for “34-37” I was able to find another document that matched the other half of the metadata. I was therefore able to conclude that these two documents had been lumped together in an error and wrote extensive notes to communicate that to my teams.
The rest of the week consisted of the usual meetings, which were fun as always. I was finally able to see how the digital mapping program has progressed, and I was quite impressed! The programmers have been hard at work on the process of visualization , and I can’t wait to see the progress they make in the future. For the German transcription workshop, Luke and Astrid gave me time to transcribe almost the entirety of a German letter. While the two of them gave me assistance throughout, their faith in me gave me confidence in the transcription abilities I have got so far. The English transcription workshop was also great, as with such a small showing I had time to transcribe more lines than usual.
I can’t believe this week marks the halfway point for my internship. Part of me is a bit sad its almost over, but I am quite excited for the 8 more weeks to come!