Van Neeley
English Major - Digital Humanities MinorWhat is it?
The final project for the class and myself is as follows: we worked as a group to create a website essentially marketing our Special Collections here at Georgia Southern, complete with links, information about the books, individual book statuses, and general rules about how to handle the book. The project consisted of two parts: The team split into pairs of two the retrieve information about the books onto a spreadsheet, gathering that information and submitting them to the Georgia Southern Commons - my job -, and to prepare the website for launch. The second part consists of actually setting up the website to showcase the collection, and my job was the introduction page to give a preview of what the Special Collections is, where to find it, how to schedule an appointment, and how to handle the books.
Georgia Southern Commons
Basically, Georgia Southern Commons is the database that myself and my partner took raw data from a spreadsheet such as the author, language, the geolocation of books, and much more information, and submitted the books to be published onto the early modern books website. This was the most time-consuming process in the project, and it took a lot of correlation between myself and Autumn Johnson, head of Special Collections, to get a clear picture of how to handle the database. Fortunately, it became easy, and was rinse-and-repeat after the first couple of submissions.
Introduction Page
This phase of the project was not as difficult as the first phase. My job here was to provide a suitable introduction to what the Special Collections is and how to portray it to the public at their first glance. A brief introduction and fun facts are included along with links to scheduling an appointment with a specialist to view the books and some tips to handle the books.
After Thoughts?
Overall, not only do I think we did something important as a class, bonding with each other with being inconstant communication, but more so we did something important for the Georgia Southern community. We have created a new outlet for the library and expanded Henderson's use. The team provided much needed attention to an important, and rather fascinating, section of the library by bringing attention to the public.