Project #2 - Miniature Collection

The first Christmas season that I worked for the library, another employee was showing me around the attic in preparation for dragging out all the saved decorations. She showed me a box full of all sorts of small miniature animals and other figurines and told me she didn't know where they had come from. After picking some of them to use in displays, we put the box back into the attic and I promptly forgot about them.



Last Christmas, I was once again rummaging around the attic, and came upon another box of minis. Inside this particular box was a small sign that stated that the figures were a collection originally owned by a woman named Ivy Payne, and that were donated to the library when she died in the 1980's. She was apparently an animal lover who lived in the Elkhart/Slocum area, but I've not been able to find out much else on her.



When I dug farther into the box I found an exquisite china tea set, all in miniature, and a tiny Limoge pitcher and bowl along with several other small vases and figurines. This turned out to be only one box of several, one being the box we found that first year, that contained a huge collection of miniature animals... a lost treasure of sorts, hidden in the attic for years.



When I showed them to our director, she was very excited and wanted them all photographed and added to our catalog for future reference. Little did I know what a job that would turn out to be. You see, there are well over 500 individual objects we have located so far, and I think there very well may be still more hidden in the attic.



Our Catalog Librarian and I brainstormed, trying to figure out the best way of dealing with them, and, never having added an artifact to our catalog in the past, still haven't come up with a good template to accomplish this. You see, our library uses a system called Marc for cataloging. I don't really understand much about it, but from what I gather, it's intended use is for cataloging printed material, not artifacts. In other words, it's not museum software. Anyway, our catalog librarian is working on that puzzle, and I'm confident that she'll figure something out.



In the meantine, it was decided that I would go ahead and begin inventorying and photographing them. I began by sorting the items and then creating standard accession numbers for each different item to be used as one of the identifiers in the record, along with assigning a standard barcode to the item. I've still got a couple of boxes left to go on this task, but, to break the monotony, have also begun photographing them.



Keep in mind that there are 100's of these items, some as small as 1/4" x 1/4", and each one (with the rare exception) has to be dealt with separately. I originally tried using our Canon PowerShot A95 with 5.0 megapixels, on a standard copy stand, but on the smaller items, this didn't produce a clear enough photo. So I brought my camera from home to use, which produces a little better picture. This camera is a PowerShot A630 that has 8.0 megapixels. I also rigged up a small stage using a lightbox and some cardstock, that I placed under the lights on the copy stand. With both the lights from the stand, and the lights from the lightbox turned on, it illuminates the objects pretty well. Using this setup, I was finally able to get some decent photos. I'll try to figure out how to upload a sample photo later in the week so you can see what I mean. If you have any other ideas on how to make a better photo, please don't hesitate to let me know.



I've worked on this project for a total of about 2 months now, off and on, but have had to once again set it aside because of the urgency of other projects. I do plan on getting back to it sometime during the summer, and for now, all the tiny objects are all safely packed in boxes, taking up the limited space in my office. I hope that when I finally get back to the project, I'll have a cataloging template so I can go ahead and totally finish one item before moving on to another. I'll probably be sick of looking at them by the time I'm done, but for now, I think they're a pretty special treasure. :-)

Project #1 - The Cemetery Database

This is, by far, the biggest, and longest running project that I have ever been involved in. I had the idea to create a database such as this many years ago, but was never in a position to actually do it until I went to work for the Palestine Public Library. I started my employment there in the summer of 2004, and shortly thereafter shared my idea with our director. She was thrilled and gave me permission to work on it for our Special Collections Room. Many, many hours later, and with the help of our great volunteers, we now have a database that is well under way to being a valuable tool for genealogists with roots in Anderson County. My sincere Thanks go out to each and every one of you for your help and encouragement. The only other thing I can offer in return, is the hope that our work will survive and be of help for years to come.

My original goal was to list every cemetery in our county (Anderson) and cross reference every name that each one has been known as over the years into one master database. Then to add links to maps, written directions, GPS coordinates, enumerations (listings of burials), and photos of all of the headstones in each cemetery.

I did not (and still don't) have a program for webpage building, and indeed originally had no intention of making it accessable on the internet. While I do have the ability to write basic code, I know my limitations. I do not know enough to build what I had in my mind, nor do I have the time or inclination to learn how. So I fell back on an old reliable program to create my masterpiece, MS Word :-). Yes, I know it has it's limitations, but I was already familiar with it and felt confident that it would do what I wanted it to do. And if it was only accessible through a computer in our library, then so be it. Bottom line, it would attract patrons into our library.

But over time, I realized that being able to present it to the world through our library website is what my goal should have been the whole time. Yes, I was wrong. I admit it. In the past, we were limited on what changes we could do to the site, but times have changed. We now have the ability to include the database with little or no expense. So now we're investigating web-building software, looking for a program in which I can not only import the work I've already done, but that has several badly needed features that are not available in Word. If anyone out there has any suggestions, please don't hesitate to tell me. With any luck, before too long, we'll have found a tool that will make my life much easier, and the researchers much happier.

I'll go into more detail about this project in another post later on. I've rambled on way too long in this one. I'm going to move ahead to try to summarize the other projects that we're working on at the library. If you want to know more about this database before I post more, please don't hesitate to email me. Thanks for your time!

Our Projects

Well hey there! I've been thinking about doing this for a while, and I guess now is as good a time as any. The biggest thing I hope to accomplish by writing this is to keep everyone up to date on the numerous projects that we have going at the library. If you know me, you know that I've always got some sort of "project" going (grin) and lately it feels that I'm not really accomplishing a lot. My plan is to attempt to list some of them here, along with short descriptions, with the hope that if I see it them print, I can better gauge what I need to do to actually finish some of them. Any ideas or help that you, as my readers, can give me on any of these projects, will be deeply appreciated. So without further ado, welcome to My World!