Internship at Skagit Valley College

For the final week in my directed fieldwork I completed the scanning, digitizing, and cataloging aspects of this project. For the scanning I was able to complete all of the Cardinal Newspapers, Descant magazines, Sqajet journal, and several different miscellaneous materials in the Student Services collection. The Cardinal Newspaper was the voluminous with editions of the newspaper from the 1930’s to the 1990’s. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t scanning any duplicate editions so that also required some sifting through of delicate pages. Since the oldest pages were from the 1930’s the material could be very delicate, and also had numerous rips, tears, fading of letters, and folding that needed to be smoothed out while trying not to rip the pages further. I also had difficulty with some of the Descant and Sqajet materials since they were in small booklets, it was hard to get the pages as flat as possible without getting my fingers in the images. I am not happy with some of the images that I captured since the pages appear warped. However, overall I was able to get the contents of the pages captured even if it might not look very pretty.

Once I had the material scanned I then worked on transferring the material to ContentDM. Unfortunately, there is not enough space on the ContentDM server to contain all of the material that I digitized, so on top of the Athletics material that I had already uploaded I was able to upload some of the oldest Cardinal editions, the Descant, and the Sqajet materials. Below is a list of some of the digital files that I was not able to upload to ContentDM due to lack of software space.

When uploading the material to ContentDM, like I had previously indicated, it required some getting used to. We had enabled a controlled vocabulary for the Subject Headings line as well as the format line. I also had to figure out how much to include in the “Description” section, We wanted to include the article titles for the description for the Newspapers. However, that would have been too intensive of a process for this size project, we determined to include only the article titles from the first page of the newspaper. I determined that I would have to include all of the poem, prose and artwork names for the Descant and Sqajet materials which did include a larger time commitment. We also made sure to include the names of the authors, editors, and artists in the “Contributors” section. Overall, I enjoyed the cataloging process and I wish that I was able to continue with this project for longer.

During the final day of this project I also made sure to clean up the archive a bit and file away some miscellaneous material that hadn’t been included in the original re-organization process. Some things that I left out of the archive was material from the Whidbey Island campus, material that needed to be reviewed before it could be included in the archive, and finally material that was being set aside for the 100th Anniversary for Skagit Valley College. I was also able to finish my revision of the Taxonomy and Hierarchy spreadsheet and that was sent off to my site supervisor.

In the end there was some material that I wasn’t able to digitize from the Student Services collection. This included the Yearbooks and some photos that I found too late in the project to include them in the scanning process. The yearbooks were not able to be digitized using the scanning machine available to us, they would require some more specialized scanning capabilities in order to properly digitize them. This was something that we knew from the start and were expecting. Other than these items the rest of the Student Services collection has been scanned and digitized. Some of the items have been cataloged and the rest will be completed when the library updates their software system to a system that has more storage space.