Final Self Evaluation

Kristen Bogani
Internship Self Evaluation

For my internship, I worked with FSU instructor Michael Neal and three other interns.
Professor Neal is in charge of the FSU Card Archive and he taught us a great deal about how it
works, what he and his interns do within the archive, and how to use the website to create our
own individual projects. The FSU Card Archive is a really neat feature that Michael brought to
FSU. The archive consists of different collections each of which contains a sum of post cards
that a particular individual has donated to the archive. Some post cards in the archive date all the
way back to the 1800s while others come from as recently as the mid-2000s.
The archive serves many purposes. The first and most obvious is that creating a digital
archive for old, worn out post cards makes it easy to place those delicate cards into a plastic
sleeve and put them away somewhere safe without hiding their content away from people who
would like to look at them. It ensures that the cards are kept in good condition and yet hundreds
of people a day could potentially look at a card. Without an archive like this, many of these cards
would be lost, ruined, or thrown out because they are seen as being ephemeral. Which brings me
to the second point that these cards are not just ephemera because they serve an important
purpose of displaying the progression and history of the English language; it records how people
conversed with one another and how that changed over time. It was very interesting and sort of
difficult to read the very old cards because where words were indiscernible, we couldnt just
guess. The sentences quite often would trail off onto an unexpected word because people spoke,
and therefore wrote, differently at different time periods. The last reason this archive exists is
simply because it is interesting to look at and experience. The pictures on (some of) the cards are
telling of a certain place and time.
After exploring the archive and getting used to the different types of post cards that there
were to enter, we learned about the Dublin Core. The Dublin Core is used for resources that
require organization of metadata. Basically it is a set of categories and entries that help to
organize and extract certain items when searches are entered. Without entering the Dublin Core
and other metadata, people would not be able to search for anything in the archive, it would be
more like an open gallery than a database, and with over 5,000 cards that would be hectic and
unorganized. Each card was given a unique identification number to be filed under depending on
which collection it was from, and I learned to title the cards appropriately and record what
subject matter was present on the cards. Entering the information seemed like it would be very
simple at first but it was a much bigger challenge than I had anticipated. I felt that I was more
confident in inputting the extra metadata than the Dublin Core metadata but later learned that I
didnt need to feel any pressure to fill in every category or information I was uncertain of, which
was a very helpful lesson. For example, some of the Dublin Core categories include the publisher
of the card, the distributor of the card, the printing company of the card, and the artist or
photographer of the image on the card. The problem is that many of the (especially older) cards
have only some, if any, of this information on them. Also, unless the card actually says
Published by, Distributed by, etc., followed by a company or persons name, we cannot
assume what the company did. So many of the cards would have several company names on
them, but since we didnt know what was what, we were unsure of how to complete this section.
After expressing our concerns to our instructor, he explained that those categories are there
because some cards do have all of that printed on them (like newer post cards, for example).
Once you enter the information, as he explained, the viewers on the site dont see empty category
spaces like we do on the admin pages (which is bothersome to see), they only see the information
that is there. This helped a lot because he also explained that we shouldnt try to fill in anything
that we arent positive of (even if that means leaving the majority of the categories empty)
because it would throw off all the searches and make the ones that are accurate become hidden in
the incorrect cards. The Dublin Core was so specifically altered for the use of post cards that we
had to use a print-out cheat sheet Michael suggested for a while that explained what each
category title translated to in post card terms.
The second type of metadata is post-card-specific, so it was used to note whether a post
card was a special type of card, what it said in handwriting and print, and information about the
stamps and post marks. The special post cards were interesting to see, though I did not run into
each type of them. The special cards are when a real photo is used on a card (this was an
expensive and therefore rare process long ago). I saw one real photo card in person and it was
really interesting how differently the ink looked. Another category that I ran into was the bas
relief, or embossed cards. An interesting type that I saw on the digital archive and included in my
exhibit, but didnt run into while adding cards, was the hold-to-light cards which display a neat
effect on the cards front picture when held to the light. These special cards werent hard to fill
in, they were just hard to find, so there wasnt any trouble with that. The typing-what-waswritten was very difficult sometimes though. As pointed out by Michael, many people used to fill
these things out before getting on a flight, in a car on the way to the airport, or just when they
were generally rushed. Because of that, along with the fact stated earlier that people spoke
differently, some cards had completely indecipherable parts to them. This really bugged me at
first because I really hate to leave things incomplete (which is also why the empty Dublin Core
categories got to me), but we had some techniques to avoid leaving the spaces completely blank.
For words that we could only partially make out we marked with brackets, and the letters we
knew with dashes for questionable letters like this: [M-ha--]. More than anything this happened
with peoples names because a lot of people used nicknames like Pah-o or Dearie, and a lot of
words just didnt even look like they meant anything. One great solution to this was context clues
because if the words around it made a certain word make sense, I could often look closely and
see if that is what the word said, and my peers helped a lot as well. Sometimes a second set of
eyes is all it takes, and we asked one another (or Michael) when we needed help seeing
something on a card. The last difficult part of this was the post marks and stamps. The stamps
were strange because we had to enter the price in US currency but some stamps were priced in
different currencies, so we would have to figure out what it translated to. Also some of the dates
on the post marks were really difficult to read because the stamps were either never very dark, or
had been so worn that hardly any ink was left. Thankfully, a lot of people used to also date the
cards in hand writing above their writing.
The next thing that we did was some editing of previous entries. I didnt do a lot of this
work because we had an option and I preferred entering cards, and wanted to create and exhibit.
What we had to do was examine the photos of cards and check the metadata that had been
entered to make sure everything was correct.
Lastly was the exhibit that we had the option of creating. An exhibit in the archive is a
separate page dedicated to anything we chose to create a card collection of. People had created
many exhibits from cards about love, to humorous cards, and even an exhibit full of cards to a
family that was listed as the recipient of many cards. The topic I decided to create for my exhibit
was cards sent out or received on historically significant dates. The process I used was very
tedious and time consuming but I am very happy with the outcome of my work. First I had to go
through the postcards one by one (I ended up clicking through more than half of the over-5,000
cards) and look at all the dates on the cards. I couldnt just enter the dates into the search box
because some people enter dates as numbers with slashes, some with dashes, and some written
out fully. Add onto that the fact that many post cards have multiple dates on them, but only one
recorded for the date on the metadata, and it was looking unlikely that a search would work. So I
looked at the photos of all the backs of the cards and recorded all the dates, whether on a post
mark or hand-written and then I looked up each date that I found and held onto the ones that had
interesting events on them. I ended up having enough cards to make several different categories I
my exhibit, too. One category included the dates of scientific achievements and historical
moments, the second category was for political, war-related, and world-affair dates, and the last
category (my favorite) was dedicated to dates of events in sports, pop-culture and other
miscellaneous events. The bulk of my word count for the internship was included throughout my
exhibit as I went into detail for each card about the corresponding event, and I very much
enjoyed creating it.
Overall I think that this internship experience was perfect for me and taught me a lot. I
learned about entering metadata, different types of post cards, old language use, and a lot about
history in general. Following below is a record of the entries and word count I completed:
http://fsucardarchive.org/items/show/5211 (110 words)

http://fsucardarchive.org/exhibits/show/historical-date-cards (2,549)

Final Self Evaluation

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Kristen Bogani

Internship Self Evaluation

http://fsucardarchive.org/items/show/5216 (106 words)

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