Meeting Minutes – 9/4/2012

In preparation for our informatonal/first official meeting of the semester, Allison, Sarah, Caitlin, and Celia met to discuss what we had done over the summer and plan for the coming meeting/year.

Caitlin

• This summer at the Smithsonian, she worked on the Biograpy section of American Enterprise (AE) and finding material culture related to the exhibit
  • Whaley will not be included in the Biography section
  • For AE, the cotton story is now predominantly in “The Business of Slavery” and some in a global section
    • We think this doesn’t change anything for us – highlights that online a separate but complementary project
• Gave us some information about AE generally, i.e. there has been change in the themes, possibly name, etc,

Sarah

• Plan for implementing research
• i.e. Oral History
  • Have a tutorial
  • Put together packet/binder to take with when conducting oral histories
    • Consent forms (Sarah has templates)
    • Image consent forms
    • Loan forms
• Image Scanning
  • Similar to oral histories
• Research for primary/secondary sources
  • Spreadsheet to-do list of sources we can start looking at
    • Assign people to different sources
• Have a secondary sources form for people to fill out
  • Key words
  • 150 word abstracteople don’t look
  • Key ideas relating to exhibit
  • So people don’t keep looking at the same things
• Primary sources
  • Good model with newspapers, keep going
  • Have a lead on the different types of research so there is ownership of part
  • Allison’s input
    • The REALLY good stuff  – we should caputre and put on Omeka immediately
      • External  hard drive is high-res,  permanent backup
      • Omeka – low-res, so people see what we have up
    • NEED Permissions
      • Allison is the gatekeeper – She is the person who makes it public and is the holder of all signed permission forms
      • Can easily hit the ground running on things where not dealing ewith people, but need to be careful when dealing with people re: permissions

Celia

• Wants to set up a task management system to organize what needs to be done/who is doing what – the blog is hard to sift through.
• Also a good place to log hours
• During meeting we started a system using Excel.  This is located in the Admin section of Dropbox.
• Set up with 4 spreadsheets (Admin, Research, Education, and Hours).  People can go here to see what they are assigned and log the status of different projects.
• Hours should be logged weekly.

 

We also talked about equipment for oral histories and image processing, contacting people re orali histories, and next semester’s oranizational strategy considering Allison will be on sabattical.  These will be ongoing conversations.

We planned to have our informational meeting this Friday, 9/7, and a followup meeting the next week 9/14 so that by the end of the second meeting we can tasks assigned to new and old people.