Friday, January 15, 2010

January 15, 2010 Work Party

We had a great work party on January 15 at York County Community College. Here is a photo of some of our volunteers: O.R. Cummings, front left; from left to right in the back row: Ed Ramsdell, Ed Dooks, Amber Tatnall, Karen Dooks, and Herb Pence. We are posing with the newly arrived and complete collection of O.R.'s research albums.

Do please note Herb's Mickey Mouse gloves which he loves to show off ;) What you can't see behind us is what keeps us going: delicious coffee and donuts from Congdon's and Karen's famous beef and barley soup.

Over the last few months, as we prepared for the grant project, the volunteers had been working with a small subset of the collection - just to get things started. Now, with the entire collection on campus, we are primed to Get Busy. Thanks to Donald Curry, the Seashore Trolley Museum shop manager, who has been housing the albums safely for several years. Thanks also to Ed Dooks and Randy Leclair for their assistance in transporting the collection to the College.


The volunteers have been very busy cataloging and describing the images in the albums, as we prepare for the actual grant project to begin. It's a big job: over 25 albums filled with photographs, postcards, maps, and ephemera. At this week's work party, we finished the cataloging and description for five of the albums. We had a great turnout of hard-working volunteers, including O.R. who provided oracular magic as usual! Funniest moment of the day: when Herb asked O.R. if he knew the name of the horse in the photograph. There was an actual pause while we all waited confidently for the answer. Best laugh of the week, Herb!


Here you see Ed and Karen with their completed albums. Only twenty something more to go! These folks work *so* hard!

The next step will be to enter all of that hard-won data into a database to create a finding aid, as well as to generate the descriptive pages that will face the newly mounted images in the archival albums. Today we created the database and began data entry.


Here's a screenshot. What can I say? I'm a database geek.
Submitted by Amber Tatnall

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