July Update

Hard to believe, it's already been a month since I joined the Five Colleges! I want to thank everyone for making me feel welcome and helping me get rolling on the many projects going on. I've settled in at Oberlin now and have had successful day trips to visit Kenyon and Denison, and I hope to see Wooster and Wesleyan soon. A lot of my time in July was spent just learning how everything works here and familiarizing myself with past projects and new technology. But also have been working on three projects in particular.

The first is Denison's digitization of government documents about WWII Japanese American internment camps. This project began some time ago, and digital scans of 30 documents were created and saved, unfortunately, the project was never completed and the digital documents aren't publicly available. I'm currently sorting out what has been scanned, checking or creating a new OCR scan for full text searching, and setting up a home for them, probably in the DRC.

Another Denison project I'm working on is "Writing Our Story: An Analysis of Black Student Protest as Denison University." This NGL proposal already has scanning of documents underway, so I've focused on selecting metadata elements and setting up a process to easily record metadata.

At Oberlin I've been working on the institutional repository, the Oberlin Scholarship collection. This collection has been set up on the DRC and has had a number of test items added successfully, what I'm working on is finding a workflow for batch uploads and making improvements to the web design.

These projects received my attention in July as it was easy to join in what had already been started, and they are giving me a chance to become more familiar with the DRC and other tools I'll be using frequently. If anyone else has project they'd like me to get going on now, please let me know- I can be reached by email at caoyler@gmail.com or phone 440-775-6490.