Approaching an End of an Era

This week I was almost able to finish my first round of adding keywords. This has been a long tedious process of me trying to develop the best method to do this, and I think going into my second round, now that I know what I am looking at and I am familiar with all the documents within my section, it should be a bit easier to navigate even though I will be adding in more elements such as marking down mentions of specific people and places, and looking at letters that have not been translated into English. One thing I am looking forward to is that there should not be too much I have not seen before. There were many times when doing this first round of keywords that I would get stuck on a letter because of a weird formatting issue or technicality located in either the virtual SAA database or “The Documents of Brotherly Love”.

For example, this week I was looking at a document that had two letters within it. I knew the letters were the same, but at a glance, I had assumed that one was in Dutch, the other a German translation. On closer inspection, I realized they were both German. With that I was not one hundred percent certain which document was the original and though I had a guess, I was not sure how to label this other copy. Fortunately, Dr. Beiler was able to take a look and I learned that the copy was actually an attempt at transcription work sometime in the twentieth century.  Fortunately, she was also able to tell me how she wanted it labeled, but I am looking forward to this Summer when I do not have to ask as many technical questions as I did this Spring.

This week, my coworker and I who agreed to take on the standardization of the keywords got to meet with another team member and edit the definitions as needed. It was fun to break up adding keywords with some collaboration work, especially since the team member we talked to is the lead for the SAA database. I learned a great deal about how the letters we focus on can look different at times. So, it was interesting to discuss the keywords with him and compare the kinds of documents we have in our respective sections. I really cannot believe that the semester is already over. I am excited to continue this work over the summer because I would like to finish all the little projects I started.