RICHES Internship Blog Post #2

           This week, at my internship with RICHES, I finished up my first piece of metadata early on in the week. I ran into a technical issue that we had to address at our meeting on Monday. This issue was that the security certificate had expired and I was unable to access the RICHES website to finish up the last few cells of the metadata on the spread sheet until I was able to access the website again. During our meeting Kirk explained how to access the website in the meantime. I was also given a link on how to accomplish this. After that, everything went pretty smoothly. When I had submitted my metadata, I was a bit nervous since I was not entirely confident since the metadata is much more in-depth at RICHES than I have had with my previous experience with metadata. I am extremely happy though that the level of metadata is more complex at RICHES. It gives me an extremely valuable opportunity to learn about the different kinds of metadata requirements. It also prepares me for the future as well. I treasure this opportunity. The knowledge I will be gaining from this internship in general with an emphasis on metadata and the portion of my previous internship in which I also worked on metadata will be extremely useful when it comes time for me to capstone and write my thesis, since I am planning on doing a traditional master’s thesis, as well as a digital project. This is because for my main primary source, “The Sanford Municipal Police and Court Dockets,” I will need to create an Excel spread sheet that covers a great deal of information from these records between 1927-1948 to put in my thesis itself and in my digital project. This will comprise a lot of information from these records and metadata will help me complete my thesis and project. I just received comments back today from my supervisor, Geoff. I made one error and that was with the GeoChrons. Geoff explained why it is significant and how to go about finding this information for the next set of metadata. I will be going back into the spread sheet this weekend and adding it in and sending it back to him with the GeoChrons corrected. 
            Today, we also had a meeting with everyone who is working on the Bending Towards Justice multi-year project. I cannot express how excited I am to be able to help out with this. The portion of the project that we will be working on concerns African-American voting and voter suppression. During the meeting, Dr. Lester suggested I work with Dr. Gordon on the legal history portion of these topics since my master’s thesis looks at legal history. She also recommended I work with Dr. Gordon since I know her and am currently doing an independent study with her on minstrelsy, which is also related to my master’s thesis. Minstrelsy was a way for many people a way to justify crime and punishment against African Americans. I am extremely excited to be working with Dr. Gordon on the Bending Towards Justice Project.
            This weekend I will add the corrected GeoChrons for the metadata I had previously submitted to Geoff and will submit the corrected version. I will also reach out to Anna about which pieces of metadata we should do next that are on the page for Weeki Wachee. I am really looking forward to everything we are doing this semester in the RICHES internship, especially the Bending Towards Justice Project and working on the metadata.

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