MBDA bids farewell to December graduate Lindsey Irvin (Berry College Class of 2012). Good luck, Lindsey - We wish you much success!

• A corp of talented and dedicated students (who continue to captivate and surprise with fascinating LOTWs and who have earned a permanent place in the mythical Archive Hall of Fame for document joining)
• A programmer willing to code through some of the most challenging digital archive issues (whether at 8:45 am, 11:13 pm, or any of the hours in between)
• A collaborative, interdisciplinary project community with a shared passion for our subject
• Twitter Bootstrap, a front-end framework par excellence
• Omeka, ‘serious web publishing’ made seriously accessible (we’re eagerly anticipating the release of 2.0 and the promise of ‘what comes next’)
• Tags that enable us to find at least one Thanksgiving letter among the thousands already published in MBDA
• A dev environment that expands to meet our growth and keeps us running (despite an unprecedented flood and Hurricane Sandy)

…there’s more, undoubtedly, but as I consider where we started (with a word doc and over 200 fileboxes of fragile, crumbling documents) and how much we’ve learned along the way, even if I could somehow list all the details I’ve missed, I couldn’t be more grateful.

Happy Thanksgiving!

- Stephanie A. Schlitz, MBDA Editor and Project Director

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 spring 2013, we expect MBDA to be featured in an article in Berry Magazine.

The programmer, Garrick, and I sat down for a few hours today to review and update project plans for spring 2012. We have lots yet to accomplish, yes, but many critical, foundational aspects of the project are now in place. Thanks to ongoing scanning by Berry students John, Melissa, and Chelsea, who are working closely with Berry College Archivist Michael O’Malley and Library Technical Asst. Cheryl Hawkins, imaging is progressing. Given the size of the MB Collection, this aspect of digitization is time-consuming, but  it is immeasurably important not only to our dissemination and community editing goals, but also to document preservation.

The digital archive is in active development. Garrick and I have been accessing image files remotely, creating derivatives, and uploading them to the development site for editing as well as for dev/test purposes. Although the front-end still looks and feels very much like a black and white abstract, behind the scenes we’re actively developing a searchable, interactive infrastructure – color & graphics coming soon too!

Leaving us at the end of fall term is Bloomsburg student and digital editor extraordinaire Steph Mihalik. Though she’ll be MISSED, I am happy to report that in part due to her wonderful work for MBDA, she’ll be interning with the Smithsonian in DC this spring – Congratulations and good luck, Steph! Bloomsburg student Becca Howells will be increasing her work this spring; in addition to editing, she’ll be taking on a very active – and much needed – role as our intern and communications coordinator.

Thanks to everyone who has worked so hard to lay the foundation this term. Your work has helped make it possible for us to ramp up the pace in 2012 and to begin making the transition from a quiet hive of activity to a prominent public presence.

“…in an organization.”

A few weeks ago, my Public Personnel Management professor taught us about being an effective supervisor and how to motivate employees. He said that every employee matters to an organization because everyone, no matter what your position, is necessary for success. He called it “Total Quality Management”. That same week I began to edit a set of letters between Martha Berry and Grady Hamrick, who was the groundskeeper on the “Mountain”. It was pretty much a one-sided correspondence because Berry sent numerous notes and letters to Grady asking him to fix a pipe, or plant more trees, or take care of a peafowl she received as a gift. At first I didn’t understand why this correspondence was so important to the overall collection. But then I remembered what I learned in class and thought about the hundreds of men and women who work at Bloomsburg as maintenance workers, groundskeepers, bus drivers, electricians, etc. Each Thursday and Friday before Open Houses, you see the groundskeeper pruning shrubs and replanting the beds and pots. The Academic Quad is mowed and the millions of leaves that fall from the trees around campus are raked. This is especially true the week before Graduation. Without a beautiful and inviting campus, no 12th grader will ever decide to come to Bloom. Without clean bathrooms and trash-free hallways, students living in the dorm would not have a suitable living experience.

Without Grady’s help, and the countless other Berry employees, Martha Berry’s dream and life’s work would not have been successful. So the statement that everyone matters is completely true.