Ending My Time With Martha Berry

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In between studying for final exams and wrapping up my internship I’ve been reflecting on the past semester spent with MBDA. As stated in a previous post, managing my school work, my family/social life, my on-campus job, and my internship got to be too much at one point but I rearranged my time and my schedule and was able to pick up my work hours.

This semester was filled with learning opportunities. I quickly learned how to edit documents although I didn’t spend a great deal of time in that department. I did enjoy editing documents that I found interesting but editing ones that were difficult to read or uninteresting was somewhat difficult. I spent some time perfecting my “online voice” while writing Letters of the Week and other blog posts. I assisted Dr. Schlitz in coming up with ideas on how to utilize the MBDA documents and site. I found my niche while joining documents. I found the repetition almost relaxing and found it easy to join at least 100 documents or so an hour. I wish I would have had less distractions and more time to dedicate to the project. I could have joined many more documents and written more blog posts.

I do, however wish the other students and I would have been able to collaborate more on blog posts or any other side projects but the distance and people’s schedules can be difficult to work around.

Overall I found this to be an extremely educational and beneficial internship. I am grateful for the digital archive and electronically mediated communication experience and skills I have gained from this internship. I believe the skills I learned will assist me in any future career path I choose to take and I am extremely thankful I had the opportunity to work for this project and I wish everyone the best of luck with the project.

 

 

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Au Revoir!

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As the semester and my first year of college draws to a close, I’m looking back on all that has happened this year. I started working with MBDA at the end of 2011 and it’s amazing to see how much the project has grown since then. It has been fun to work with Martha Berry’s documents and get a behind the scenes look at how Berry was started and how Martha kept it running. It has made me realize how much hard work is put into making Berry possible and I appreciate my opportunity to attend Berry even more. I’ve enjoyed meeting and working with everyone involved in the project. I have learned a lot this year and I’m looking forward to continuing work next year!

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LOTW Five: Birmingham, AL

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As a native of Birmingham, Alabama, I always find it interesting to find a letter sent from someone from my area. I’ll sometimes come across a letter sent to Martha Berry from the McWane family, and that name always sticks out to me. The McWane family played a huge part in the growth of Birmingham during the early 20th century because of the family’s important role in the manufacturing industry, so it’s always interesting to see either Mr. McWane or his wife send a friendly letter to Miss Berry. In this case, Mrs. McWane is wishing to buy a fan from the Berry Schools, but she also thanks Miss Berry for their meeting at Tate Springs, as well as providing some information on their seven month old son. Since I have just recently completed a final research paper for my English 102 class, with my chosen subject being the economic growth and decline of Birmingham, writing this letter of the week based on my relation to some of the letters seemed easy to me.

For those of you who are not from the great state of Alabama, Birmingham has probably one of the coolest science centers in the South. Coincidentally, it’s called the McWane Science Center. It may be aimed towards children and teenagers, but I still consider it to be one of the funnest attractions in downtown Birmingham. It has at least three floors filled with fun science activities that can be enjoyed by anyone at any age. It also has a marine/aquatic animal petting zoo, a small aquarium, a room dedicated to the McWane family’s history, an enormous IMAX theatre, and an interactive space shuttle mission. As you can tell, this place is pretty awesome. What I did not realize until now is that the McWane Center is actually home to one of Birmingham’s biggest research archives, which, at least in my opinion, makes it even more awesome.

It is always nice when editing and grouping Martha Berry’s letters to see a familiar name or place. I was lucky enough to come across Mrs. McWane’s letter, which I found to be strangely interesting considering my knowledge of the family’s importance to Birmingham. Hopefully, as I continue to group a couple of thousand documents, I can come across other letters that are of interest to me. Only recently did I find a letter explaining to Martha Berry that John D. Rockefeller Jr. could not donate money to the schools, which would have been interesting to write about (if only I could find it again).

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LOTW Four: Letter from Booker T. Washington

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co authors: Chelsea Fryar (Berry) and Becca Howells (Bloomsburg)

LOTW Three was authored by Juliette Low, founder of the Girl Scouts of America (which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year). The letter illustrated how two important individuals supported one another and highlighted the work of two women in powerful positions, which was somewhat unusual because American women were not often well-known leaders during the early twentieth century.

This week’s LOTW reflects a similar theme. Booker T. Washington sent this letter to Martha Berry in 1911. He thanks her for her donation of $5.00, sharing that the donation will help his school and his students. He also thanks Berry for her support and expresses gratitude for the time she and her teachers spent at his school.

Washington was born into slavery and eventually gained his freedom. He worked to pay for his studies and to further his education. After graduating, he taught school to children and adults and was eventually put in charge of the Normal School for Blacks at Tuskegee. He went on to do great things for The Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.

Washington believed strongly in education (especially for the African American community) and felt that one of the only ways to succeed would be to better one’s education. Martha Berry had a similar ideology. She thought so highly of education that she offered the opportunity of schooling to poor children who wouldn’t have had the chance otherwise. Like Washington, Berry also worked hard to gather donations and help to support her students and her school. As innovators in the world of education, both Martha Berry and Booker T. Washington paved the way for many scholars.

It’s interesting to see how educators like these two encouraged and supported each other. Many other school principals or founders visited Martha Berry and the Berry schools to commend her for her outstanding work. Sometimes they even brought donations collected by the students of their schools to give to the poor children at Berry. Actions like those really connected the students and schools of America.

It amazes us how much we can learn from watching the way other people live their lives or run their businesses. We’re sure the Berry teachers that visited Washington’s school had great conversations with the local teachers and were able to learn a lot from each other about how to educate in the most effective ways possible. They were also probably refreshed simply by being able to share their experiences and ideas with other teachers. This is another reminder of how wonderful it is to live in community with other people.

 

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Spring Milestones

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We’ve recently reached some significant milestones at MBDA. To date, we’ve uploaded more than five thousand images to the dev site. If this were a race, the Berry imaging team would be winning because they’re scanning documents even faster than we’ve been uploading them (and they’re beating us by a margin of nearly 2 to 1).

MBDA Bloomsburg intern Becca Howells has spent countless hours on digital editing, matching orphaned documents with their parents to ensure that – despite the fact that every scanned image is mogrified and then batch uploaded as an individual document – multiple pages of the same document are reunited in the virtual world.

Hundreds of MBDA documents have been described using the Dublin Core metadata guidelines; MBDA is OAI-PMH compliant, and thousands of lines of programming code have been written for the digital archive and the Crowd-Ed plugin.

Our continued growth and development can also be measured in gigabytes. That we just requested a bump to 80 GB (we were nearing 50) on the dev server at Bloomsburg is another revealing indicator of progress (thanks Bloomsburg Univ. networking staff for keeping us running and for the bump to 120 GB!).

In blog terms, collectively, we’ve authored 21 posts on Crowd-Ed (22 counting this one); in the aggregate, that’s an average of more than two per month between August 2011 and April 3, 2012. But eleven of these posts were actually published between February and March 2012 – by students – another sign that we’ve been making great strides.

Steph Mihalik (Bloomsburg) parlayed her MBDA experience into a spring 2012 internship with Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in DC; Meg R (Berry) recently authored an article about her work on MBDA for the History Department’s newsletter. Students in my History of the English Language class have transcribed MBDA documents and have explored MBDA to learn about manuscripts, language and culture, and historical language description. I’m wrapping up an article about digital archive development and will  be speaking about the technological innovations underpinning our Crowd-Ed plugin at an academic conference later this month. During fall 2012, we expect MBDA to be featured in an article in Berry Magazine.

In short: A lot is happening! Though MBDA won’t go live (i.e. be publicly launched) until fall 2012, we’re making tremendous progress.
As inspired as I was by Martha Berry when I was a student at Berry College (every time I passed the Gate of Opportunity, I silently thanked MB), thanks to our work with MBDA, I know more today about Martha Berry and her extraordinary life and work than I ever did then. As an alma mater, MB has never failed to impress or to inspire. Getting to know her first-hand through MBDA: an honor and a privilege.
- Stephanie A. Schlitz, MBDA Project Director 
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On a Congressman’s Wall

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This week I came across a request for a blue baby blanket made from the angora goats that resided at berry. I found this pretty interesting because it shows an example of an early Berry enterprise. I also came across two letters from the United States Congress by way of an M.C. Tarver. The first was requesting scenes from berry and I quote, “I would like to have some views either of the school buildings or students or anything likely to prove most illustrative of the character of the Berry Schools…” The second Letter was thanking Miss Berry for four views of students and scenes at Berry. There is mention of a view of a bridge which Tarver said was, “…the most beautiful that I know anything about.” I feel that both of these examples show the unique characters of Berry that so many different types of people value. From the craftsmanship of baby blankets to the natural beauty of the campus, Berry can be appreciated by all who come across it.

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Interview with MBDA Research Asst. Steph Mihalik

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Bloomsburg University graduating senior Steph Mihalik (May 2012) was one of the digital editors for the MBDA project during summer and fall 2011. Thanks in part to her experience and digital archive work with the project, she received an internship in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum of American History in the Archives Center. I recently spoke with Steph to catch up and to see how her internship was going.

How working with MBDA has helped you with your internship: “MBDA laid the ground work for what I do at the AC. Things are not exactly similar so MBDA was definitely a good introduction to archiving (or at least an aspect of it). Many of the terms, lingo and styles are similar, so that’s good. Working with MBDA stood out on my resume, so in a way it helped me get my internship.”

What do you do there?: “At the Archives Center (AC) in the National Museum of American History (NMAH), I work mainly as a “Reference Intern”. The AC serves a number of functions but their biggest service is to maintain a Reading Room where researchers can come and work with the AC’s collections. As a reference intern, I sit at the Reference Desk and answer questions from the researchers; help them use our finding aids and sometimes help them go through the collection they chose; locate the materials they want in our storage facilities and actually go to pull them; answer phone calls and run errands for the archivists on duty. Overall, my internship is going really, really well. I have been able to do some very cool things with the staff archivists and get access to really special collections. To say that there is a lot to learn here is an understatement. I think I will have learned everything by the day I leave–which is definitely not a bad thing!”

I too have learned a lot so far about digital archives, editing documents, writing blog posts, and communicating via email and via the MBDA site. I know that the skills and tools I am learning while working for MBDA will greatly help me long after graduation.

 

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A Thank You

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I just scanned a whole folder entitled “Sample ‘begging’ letters,” which I think is just funny, and a little impressive. It’s funny because I feel like most institutions would rather not see themselves as beggars, but apparantly Miss Martha was not opposed to the title. Although she didn’t name the folder, she did send about a bajillion and two letters asking for money, and several of them definitely had a begging tone. She closed some letters by saying “ANY GIFT WILL BE MOST APPRECIATED!” and (my favorite) “any gift, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, will be most welcome.” She managed to sound confident, gracious, successful and desperate all at the same time.

Martha Berry was so effective in raising funds because she knew how to tug people’s heart strings. She sent out pictures and stories of real students so donors could see exactly where their money was being used. She assured people that if they could go with her into the mountains to see the “rich human material that needs a chance for development” they would be as passionate about the children as she was and would do all they could to send them to Berry. Sometimes she would write about how the children are the true future of America and how they are the ”REAL patriots,” urging people to show their own patriotism by donating to the cause. In one letter I scanned this week, Martha was sending out a Mother’s Day note in which she encouraged the friends of Berry to “honor the name of [their] mother by giving a scholarship in her memory, or in honor of her if she is still living.” For twenty-five hundred dollars, people could set aside a day for their mothers – a permanent memorial which “will go down through the ages helping some mother’s neglected child.” Though some of these letters make me laugh, it’s really rather impressive because now I, along with many other grateful students, attend a great school built from money donated in response to these pleads for generosity.

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Oh my ears and whiskers!

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The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. ‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’

― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Well, it has been some time since my last post here on the site and like the White Rabbit, I’m afraid that I am dreadfully late in making another. As I’ve been scanning and checking various things about the new location of the MBDA folder on our network, I’ve been considering at length where I should begin with my second blog post. It wasn’t long before the quote from above – I’m a really big Lewis Carroll fan, you see – came to mind and I decided I would just write what came to mind, for better or worse. So to you, the reader, I apologize now for what will most likely be a layer of rambling peppered with non sequiturs.

I am both astonished and delighted by the pace that MBDA has taken now that there are a number of other talented scanners on the job. This past week I was asked to do a quick count of the amount of images we had scanned in the month of February. Can you guess what the number is? I certainly was caught by surprise. I counted a total of 5025 images scanned in February – on a leap year too! I don’t remember exactly how many images a month were being scanned back when I was all by my lonesome doing it, but I know it was nowhere even remotely close to that. It was very heartening to say the least.

As many of you know, I am now also allowed to go behind your backs and carefully scrutinize all of your work so that I might have a reason to abuse my powers as supervisor and judge you harshly for your mistakes. Joking aside, I was very impressed with what I saw when I went back and reviewed many of the images over the last couple of weeks. Any errors I found were miniscule, not to mention far and in-between. Even the more difficult images – you know, the ones with odd edges or text that doesn’t quite fit – you all did a very good job of ensuring you got the best possible scan. What I was happiest to see was that the advice I offered in our last – and only? – group meeting was taken to heart. Keep up the good work everyone!

Oh, well, I’m actually five minutes past when my shift was supposed to end and I’m a bit concerned that the alarm in Archives might go off if I try to leave any later (I work late on Mondays, for those who weren’t aware). I’ll definitely try to make posting here a more regular thing. Until next time then!

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Augustus O. Bacon

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I have been working in the Berry College archives for three years, so I have, from time to time, been in contact with the Martha Berry correspondence. I always find it thrilling to hold in my hands (or gloves) a letter written by one of Martha Berry’s more renowned friends; President Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie. Dealing with the correspondence more consistently through the MBDA project, I have also been surprised by many how similarities and connections to my own life I find reflected in the letters.

For instance, this semester my Creative Non-Fiction class was assigned to read a memoir (Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of Place) by a man who was raised during the 1930’s in Bacon County which is in Southern Georgia. The beginning of the memoir includes a great deal of historical background on Bacon County, and I learned that the county was formed in 1914 and named for Senator Augustus Octavious Bacon. The morning after I read this, I was at work scanning for the project when the signature “Augustus O. Bacon,” a hard name to miss, caught my eye at the bottom of a letter. It was a rather short letter commending Martha Berry for the work she was doing to help improve the state of Georgia, but I discovered it was from the very same Augustus Bacon, and that in 1928 he was still serving on the state Senate. I was so excited to stumble upon the letter, and I could not wait to go to class and share the discovery with my professor. Discoveries like these are part of the reason why I find working with the MBDA Project so intriguing, and they provide a reminder to just how vast a range of time, place and experience the correspondence contains.

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