This week was a busy one at the Glenn Black Lab. Ben Barnes, Second Chief of the Eastern Shawnee Nation, was doing research as a visiting scholar. He and Wayne Huxhold, the library coordinator, began drafting a statement regarding sensitivity of certain items related to Native American rituals, practices, customs, etc. contained within the Archaeology Lab’s collections. This document will undoubtedly affect the digitization of the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection as it is likely some sensitive information will be included in that collection. The plan to address this is to continue with the digitization but make it known that if sensitive information is found there is a process of contacting the staff at Glenn Black to have the materials redacted. While this process is not ideal, it will be much easier than having experts read through the materials before they are digitized.
This week also included a third meeting with Julie Hardesty, the metadata analyst for IUB Libraries. During these meeting we were able to figure out how to deal with storing the massive amount of digital files associated with the project. I also ingested the EAD finding aid with one box of the Potawatomi sub-series described at the item level. The plan is for Kara Alexander, a digital librarian at IUB, to create a spreadsheet which will allow the ingest process to connect the digital files and the EAD in order to link the files to the online finding aid. Hopefully this trial portion of the finding aid will be available online in the next few weeks. While there is still a lot of coding to be finished, a functional online finding aid should be available soon.
In the meantime, I have been going over my code, checking the citations against the Chicago Manual of Style to ensure that there are no errors in the code. I also figured out how to include a link from the EAD finding aid to the Zotero bibliography for that specific portion of the finding aid. This will allow a seamless transition from the materials included in the collection to the full text of the work. This re-contextualizes the information in a way that would be impossible in an analog format. It is this kind of collection that really begins to show what can be done with EAD. Hopefully future archival collections will be able to have the same level of synergy between the collections and the creators.
Adventures in Archives 