School References/Notebooks/Photographic Forensics

February 18 & 19th (School Library)

Monday (Feb. 17th) was a school holiday.  The highlights for Tuesday and Wednesday's work in the library were being asked to put together a reference cart for a teacher whose class will be working on a science career assignment.  Yes, this middle school does not have a reference section and a darn good one I might add!  Many in education feel that schools should go totally digital with references; however I big to differ.  I think students gain a lot of valuable insight into research techniques by going through print reference sources.  There are more than encyclopedias and atlases in the collection.  At one point the school's former librarian invested heavily in acquiring series of books on subjects such as careers, constitutional amendments, biographical material, etc..  We've found that the best way for the students to access this material is to prepare subject appropriate carts ahead of time.

The other highlight was the opportunity to assist students with an English literature assignment.  This was my first experience in assisting faculty with the use of the HP notebook laptops that were donated to the school last year.  These notebooks are not the most state-of-the-art but it does give the students the opportunity to use digital technology for their assignments.  Many of the students at this school do not have access to computers at home and rarely visit the public library.  I am eager to learn more about how to help students fully utilize the digital resources in the library.  Up to this point, I feel the administration has been reluctant to allow me to take part in the management/administration of the HP notebooks although they are stored in the library's multimedia/audiovisual room.

Feb. 20th (Sacramento Room/Special Collections)

Today I've started processing a small collection of photographic images, including two glass negatives, a daguerreotype, and a few large black&white prints.  The Photograph Accession Register for all digital images in the Sacramento Room collection requires specific information such as title, donor, publication date, a physical description, and summary of the historical context of the photo.  I'm essentially doing the detective work on this images by pinpointing the details as best as I can surmise from clues such as the condition of the photograph, age, accompanying handwritten notes, etc.  My understanding is that a cataloguer for the library will enter this information as metadata tagged to the photograph's accession number/call number.  All of the images will be digitized and uploaded into the Sacramento Room's digital collections database, available at http://cdm16362.contentdm.oclc.org/.   

According to the Sacramento Room's website, the Sacramento Room Digitization Project  was launched in October 2010 with the intention of showcasing, in digital form, several choice images from the Sacramento Public Library’s Sacramento Room.   Over 3,000 photographs, postcards and menus formed the original Sacramento Digital Collections which – from beginning to end – took over a year to compile, scan, and describe. In the summer of 2013, Sacramento Public Library established an ongoing relationship with the Capital Campus Public History Program at Sacramento State University.  A student intern from the graduate-level public history program assists with all aspects of the digitization project.  My role in this digitization project is as a volunteer in evaluating the historical content of the images and ensuring detailed notes are available. 

My second bachelor's degree is in history from Sacramento State, while earning my degree I served an internship at the Center for Sacramento History.  I'm enjoying experiencing special collections/archives from a public library perspective now as a library science student.