May Avery Research Center Updates (Week 31-36)

Public Program

Since I last posted, I have completed all the interviews that I am doing for the Black in the Lowcountry project. I am so excited. So far I have completed transcribed three of the College of Charleston student interviews and have one left to do for that phase and for the second phase I finished the high school student interviews today. The college students were a little bit easier to get information and stories from, but the high school students did well and I think that the project gave them an opportunity to express themselves.

Archives

I finished describing and arranging the various collections (i.e. small collections that consist of 1-5 folders). This week I will begin to label the folders.

I created MARC records for the Lois Simms collection that I processed previously and sent this one as well as others over the cataloging department so that they can be put into the library’s and WorldCat catalog. In order to continue the workflow of creating MARC records, I created a guide to help Ms. Mayo and the new fellow with creating them, so that they can benefit from my experiences.

Last week was busy as we had three interviews for the Archival Manager position here at Avery, each of the candidates had their pros and cons and I hope that the search committee makes a good hiring decision.  

Activities

This past weekend was the 150^th anniversary of Robert Smalls capturing of the Confederate vessel The Planter. I most of the events of the weekend including the unveiling of a Historic Marker and Historic Plaque in downtown; the marker is located where he and the crew captured the vessel and the plaque is near where he picked up his wife and children. I also had the opportunity to meet some of his descendants who came down from the event. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Smalls as I was before I came to Charleston, more information can be found here:

• http://www.robertsmalls.org/
• http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=s000502
• http://www.teachingushistory.org/lessons/Smalls.html

SN: I found a lot of people from the way of Buffalo and Syracuse at this event, it was interesting to interact with them and people from the New York area, made me feel like home!

Aaisha Haykal

IMLS Fellow

Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture

March/April Avery Research Center Updates

I have a few success stories to share

• Was able to create MARC records for some of my collections that I have done and those that were processed previously, but no record was created for it. Thus, one of the collections that was uploaded into the College of Charleston Library Catalog and WorldCat was William “Bill” Saunders. Saunders is a Civil Rights Activist here in Charleston and in South Carolina. It is quite exciting to see your work in the catalog and know that people can now locate it!

• My Black in the Lowcountry project is taking off the ground, finally. I was able to interview two Black women from the College of Charleston for about an hour about their childhood, education, and perspectives on various issues. It is quite interesting to hear the variety of experiences between these two women. I have another interview scheduled for tomorrow with another Black female and I am planning on scheduling another with a Black male to get their perspective. I think that it will a great avenue for people to hear from the first-hand experience about being a Black youth in the Lowcountry. On Monday, the high school students from St. John’s High School will be in and then over the next couple of weeks, I will be traveling out there to do their interviews. Thus, the next month and half will have me doing A LOT of transcriptions. 

•  Archival Processing
• March
• I spent March processing the personal collection of Ms. Lois Simms, an educator here in Charleston. She had quite an interesting collection that was comprised of her education material, professional material, personal items, including scrapbooks and correspondence. Two of the scrapbooks were falling apart, so I digitized them. Right now they are only for in-house use, but in the future they may be placed in the Lowcountry Digital Library. 
• April
• There are a lot of small collections here, that consist of 1-5 folders, and it does not make sense to make them each a collection by themselves, thus, I am creating a collection called Various Collections and each one will be a subseries. So, far I have about 45 of these subseries, and possibly more to come. Some of the interesting material in the collection includes records relating to African American firemen in Charleston, African American movie theater owners, Slave Bills of Sale, family genealogies, etc.
• The Avery Research Center's web site is up!  This has been a point of contention, which I will not go into here, but it denotes the significance of having a web presence.

Aaisha Haykal
IMLS Fellow
Avery Research Center

Avery Research Center Updates

It has been awhile since I have written, mainly because I have been working very hard to finish processing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) collection. I am happy to say that the collection has been arranged, described, and the finding aid is completed. Yay!!! I am now working on a personal collection of a Miss. Lois A. Simms. 

We are still having trouble converting some EAD/XML records into PDF. I talked to some of the people in the College of Charleston’s Special Collections department and they sometimes have the same issue. However, no one is sure why it occurs. Thus, we are left to go through the code line by line to see if there is something that is wrong. This can be quite interesting and tedious. As of today, I have gone through that XML at least 10 times, but I still do not see what is wrong with it. One day I will be glad to report that this is fixed, hopefully sooner than later. Another project that I have been working on is creating MARC records for the collections. I am still tinkering and playing with the MARCedit software to get the record to come out correctly.

In order to celebrate the theme of Black History this year, which is African-American Women, I am working on an exhibit that highlights the contribution of Charleston, South Carolina, and Southern women to American History. I am using material from the archival and library collection to bring attention to the work that was done by these individuals.

Read more here.

Aaisha Haykal

Avery Research Center

Week Fourteen-Sixteen at Avery Research Center

Hello everyone, here at the Avery Research Center we had a couple of weeks off for the holiday season, but before the break I was busy helping Ms. Wright to create content for the Avery Messenger and inventorying the NAACP collection.

For the break, I had the opportunity to stay with a friend, Ms. Ramona La Roche (she is the author of Georgetown County, which is a book in the Arcadia Publishing’s Black in America Series), who has a home near Georgetown, SC. Her family still lives on the Arcadia Plantation in the area because they have an agreement with the landowners that allow the generations of the enslaved to still live on the property. I was amazed to learn about this type of living still occurring. I also had the opportunity to meet Ms. Minnie, Ms. La Roche’s friend who is a 94 years young (well 95, she turned 95 on Christmas) woman, who had very exciting things to tell me. Ms. Minnie grew up on the Hobcaw Barony in South Carolina and she told me stories of going to school, how she basically made the master of the Barony pay for her schooling, the treatment of the people on the plantation, her experiences as a teacher both in New York City and in South Carolina, and other interesting tidbits. She told us that Baronies were used by Northerners as hunting lodges and that the animals that the men killed were given to the African Americans. At 94 years young she was very engaging and energetic (ex. She swung on a rope swing and walks everywhere).  I want to be like her when I get to that age. We also toured Mansfield Plantation, where there are slave dwellings and a church used by enslaved people still standing. The church was renovated, but the dwellings still need care. 

Read more here. 

Aaisha Haykal
IMLS Fellow
Avery Research Center

Week Eleven-Thirteen (or Twelve)

Sorry for the delayed postings, but things since the holiday has been very fast paced here and time to write a post has not presented itself.

So a few updates.

During the week of Thanksgiving, Avery staff and volunteers did some clean-up of our respective spaces. Ms. Mayo and I worked on the archives portion, where we organized some disparate collections and found collections that needed descriptions.

The following week I began working on describing these collections, fine tuning my public program, which is tentatively called Woke Up Black Charleston. The platform that we will probably use to develop this collection is the Omeka software and I am working with the library staff to make this occur. I will keep you guys updated about this. I am excited and the rest of the staff is too about this project and what it will mean for both Avery as well as for the students.

My time has also been spent working on the Avery website, which we hope to launch soon as well as the Avery blog updates. We changed the name from “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” to “Not Just in February” and changed the image as well, from a picture of the Hospital Worker's Strike of 1969 to one of the Jenkins Orphanage Band.  

Read more here

Aaisha Haykal

IMLS Fellow

Avery Research Center

Week Ten at Avery Research Center

This week I have been busy getting my public program proposal together to submit to Dr. Williams-Lessane. Last week the Avery staff watched a documentary called Woke Up Black, which followed five African-American youth in the Chicago area. The film talks about a variety of issues that impact African-American youth including education, media representation, family life, sexuality, identity, etc. The film will be shown here in Charleston in February to at least three different schools and the director Mary Morten and the person who runs Black Youth Project (BYP), which is also out of Chicago, will talk to these students. However, while I was talking with Dr. Chase, Avery’s Public Historian, we began thought about maybe using the film as a starting point for having a Woke Up Black Charleston edition, where students can either be interviewed by a Avery staff person or they could submit their own interview (visual art, written, etc). The purpose of this would be to understand what it means to be an African-American youth in Charleston. This is not something that is evident in the current collections that we have here at Avery, so it would fulfilling a need and document a community that is not being documented. Nothing is set in stone, but I hope that it all works out.

In the hopes that this will come to fruition I have created sample questions that the students may answer, as well as investigating what types of sites would I use for my interface. I originally thought about doing a Wordpress blog, but then that got complicated about what types of permissions people would have and if people would have access to edit or delete someone’s story. Other platforms I have been investigating are Google Sites, Weebly.com, and Wikispaces. Some of the elements that I am looking at are the upload size, total storage size, possibility of having people upload their own material, but not being able to touch other people’s stuff. This is still a work in progress, so if you have any suggestions please let me know!!

To learn about my other project and about an important loss to the Charleston community, visit my blog.

Aaisha Haykal

IMLS Fellow

Avery Research Center

Week Eight and Nine

The past week and half has been low key, so I am just going to combine them.

I have been putting the finishing touches on my collections that I have done so far here, the Lecque Family Papers, the Humane and Friendly Society, and Prince Hall Chapter No. 41 Order of the Eastern Star. In addition, I created the finding aids for them using Notetab, overall the process has been easy (with a few frustrations).

On Wednesday, November 2^nd, Ms. Mayo and I led a workshop on what are archives, the benefits of them, what supplies are needed, online/virtual exhibits, and on LibraryThing, a personal library catalog for the Ravenel Caw Caw Interpretive Center. An employee there, Erica, who is the cultural interpreter formerly worked here at Avery and asked if we could come out and talk to her colleagues about the benefits of an archive for both the institution and for them. The Ravenel Caw Caw Interpretive Center, is both a nature and history interpretive center. The land that the Center is on “was once part of several rice plantations and home to enslaved Africans who applied their technology and skills in agriculture to carve the series of rice fields out of cypress swamps.” Unfortunately, we did not have time to tour the site, but hopefully before I leave I can go back there and do a tour and/or participate in one of their group activities. The workshop went really well and the staff was receptive to what we had to say and I think that they began to see the value in the need to document, preserve, arrange, and describe what they have their collection (books, papers, and artifacts). 

Read more here

Aaisha Haykal

IMLS Fellow

Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture

Week Seven at Avery

Hello Everyone, 

I have to say that reading everyone’s posts makes me jealous and happy for all of us. The work that we are doing is great, is worthwhile, and makes an impact. So give yourself a pat on the back!

This past week and half I have been working on the Order of the Eastern Star collection and finishing up my colleagues work because her time here ran out (she is actually moving to Chicago to start a new job). Therefore, I helped her double check a few facts, labeled the folders, and editing the finding aid. The collection is actually an important collection as it deals with the Craft and Crum Families (the descendants and extended family of William and Ellen Craft) and the collection is highly used as a promotional tool, so it is good that it is finally put together in an orderly fashion.

Robert Chase, who is Avery’s Public Historian, and I have been meeting and corresponding via e-mail with a scholar who has done oral histories (mostly video I think) in Charleston. She wants to make her work more accessible to the broader public, thus, I suggested that she think about making an online collection of her work. However, to expand upon this and to also implement one of my public programming ideas I thought about making a community oral history/digital storytelling project. The exact details of this has not been planned out, but hopefully in the coming months and by the first of the year I can go ahead and put it into place! 

Read more at my blog

Aaisha

Week Six at Avery

This week was quite busy, mainly writing for the Avery blog and Avery Messenger (which is the newsletter sent out to supporters). I am finishing up a blog post about the importance of Community Archiving (CA) and the role of the repository and/or archivist in such a project, which will be part one of a five week series I will do on Community Archiving (not to say that I will not write more about CA after the five weeks are over with). Then for the Messenger, Ms. Mayo and I worked on an article talking about why I am here and what I will be doing while I am here. In addition, I wrote an article about Community Archiving/Archives, mainly highlighting the reasons why communities decide to undertake such a project.

On Thursday and Friday, I worked on processing the Order of the Eastern Star collection, encoding the box and folder listing and this week I am working on the collection overview and historical note.

For more on my thoughts for the week, check here

Have a good day!!

Aaisha

Week Five at Avery

This was a busy week. I worked on social media for Avery, attended staff meetings, wrote a draft of a blog post on community archives for the Avery blog, which will go live this week (week six), and processed the Order of the Eastern Star collection.

On Thursday, October 6^th, Ms. Mayo and I attended the South Carolina Archival Association (S.C.A.A.) conference/meeting in Columbia, SC (which is about two hours from Charleston) on the University of South Carolina (USC) campus. The conference was entitled Bridging the Gap, where archival professionals shared their expertise with other professionals and new professionals. The sessions were on resumes and interviews; mentoring; and leadership. All of them provided worthwhile information and it was good to connect with other archival and information professionals in South Carolina. Ms. Mayo introduced me to some of former classmates from USC and people that she considers as mentors. In addition, we made contact with archivists that would happily give us a tour of their repositories, so I see some field trips in the near future!

For more visit http://archivaldaze-aaisha.blogspot.com/