I have submitted my final abstract to Thinking Matters. I can now create a PowerPoint presentation to generate interest in this Independent Study project.
One of the exciting events of the past week is that a Facebook page has been created for the Woman’s Literary Union. This is a big deal to the members in the sense that many members do not use computers for socializing or getting their news. The potential to generate interest in the club’s work is important enough to these members for them to put their trust in the few members who do use the Internet on a fairly regular basis. I, along with the webmaster of the WLU’s website, spent part of Saturday, February 19, carefully building a Facebook page.
Unfortunately, Facebook is undergoing some upgrades to the features offered and the “share this page with your friends” feature is unavailable. I have posted the Facebook link on my own personal Facebook wall, but it’s not as convenient as someone receiving a notification that allows one-click “Like” this page. We have 12 friends after three days. I think that when the “share” feature is fixed, we will have lots of likes. Plus, by that time, we will have some interesting posts about the type of information we are finding in the collection of texts and photos some of which date to the early days of the club – 1892 is the founding date.
My current marketing campaign is to post this comment on the Facebook pages of national agencies related to humanities, digital collections, museums, libraries, and historical societies: The Woman’s Literary Union is on Facebook now. We are working on creating a digital archive of our collection of documents that date back to the founding of the club in 1892. We look forward to sharing that info with you and other researchers.
This project is going to have several phases, including:
Preservation
1.Identify and preserve the records of the Woman’s Literary Union
2.Create and manage club archives
3.Use a professional repository to preserve and make records publicly accessible for researchers
4.Inform the public of club’s records in a media campaign
5.Participate in American Archives Month activities in October / Preservation Month in May
Share WLU history
1.Submit club history to various archives
2.Create oral histories
3.Write biographies of early membership
Service projects
1.Inventory and cataloging
2.Rehouse materials
3.Virtual volunteers of archives
Women’s History Month – March
1.Adopt a school
2.Sponsor educational speakers
3.Celebrate local women of significance
Publicize club’s project
I’ve e-communicated with an archivist at the local college about this project and I am meeting with her tomorrow to discuss methods of archiving and preserving the collection. I am very excited about that.
I have also e-communicated with a librarian and a historian. I have found these communications to lead to more resources. What I need to focus on is getting a grant to fund the archiving materials needed to store the collection.
