Daniel is in the process of completing his thesis project, An Uncommon Use for an Uncommon Press: Transforming a Reconstructed English Common Press into a Touchstone for STEM Education.
APIs for the Dissemination of Heritage Materials
One topic that our class has recently examined through our readings is the of use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to expand the accessibility and openness of cultural materials, collections, and heritage information. APIs essentially provide an automated search mechanism through which one can search numerous digital collections or catalogues. This means that instead of merely being able to examine the heritage materials stored as a local archive or library, one can in fact delve into the digital catalogues of many different cultural institutions, accessing the original materials and metadata that those institutions would have previously offered only to their onsite visitors.
I think most people would likely agree that the preservation of heritage materials and information is important – after all, it’s recently become quite common for the average individual to research their family history to build a genealogical tree. Digitizing these materials certainly isn’t enough, however, as the usefulness of preservation is severely impoverished when accessibility to the materials is poor or nonexistent. APIs, however, offer cultural institutions the means necessary to expand the reach of their catalogues and collections, through which heritage materials can be made available and navigable to a national or even global public.
Nomenclature for a Cast Iron Pan
I’m currently considering using my assortment of cast iron pans as the focus of my portion for our next project. I have approximately 18 pans (I need to recount – it’s hard to remember when I keep adding to the collection), and I love cooking with them even more than I love collecting them. I did look through Nomenclature 3.0 during yesterday’s class, to see what vocabulary I might be able to use during the project. So far, the best fitting term seems to be “Pan, Frying” under “Cooking Vessels.” I would have liked to discover a more specific term, but the way they’re categorized seems to be more about utility (frying, making muffins, making crepes, making bread, you get the gist) than material (or format, I guess?). 
Drupal
If you’ve read some of the blogposts from my classmates who struggled with Drupal, then you’ll likely have seen a range of reactions; some really appreciate this content management system (CMS), but offer caveats about where is falls short, others see the potential it has to offer, but were ultimately turned off by significant bugs or access issues, while others still found the entire experience to be a frustrating mess. I unequivocally fall into that first category, as I personally had very little trouble using Drupal to create an online exhibit for SpiRIT, and was able to complete my part of the project in just one class period. This meant that during the second of the two class periods we spent using this CMS, I was able to focus on helping other students work on their own cases, offering guidance and solving bug issues. Overall, I rather enjoyed my time working with Drupal, and certainly wouldn’t be opposed to doing so again in the future.
Our class as a whole, however, did run into some frustrating issues over the past week. We initially struggled with gaining access to the archive’s instance of Drupal, although that is more a tech support issue than a problem with the CMS itself. Still, seemingly at random, certain images in our digital exhibitions would fail to auto-shrink on their pages, and instead extended off the page in awkward ways. We also had issues getting the “Carousel Image” aspect of a larger exhibition to work properly, meaning that the thumbnail for the first-listed section of the exhibition was automatically used as the entire exhibition’s thumbnail, no matter what we tried to do to solve the issue. In one positive turn of events, at least, Jody Sidlauskas (RIT’s Associate Archivist) and I were able to tentatively solve the image resizing issue, by uploading .PNG files instead of images in the .JPG format. During my tests, that change has always fixed the issue, so hopefully that frustration with Drupal won’t bother us in the future.
Ultimately, I really liked Drupal’s potential, even though its quirks and a messy back-end slowed things down at times. It’s certainly not perfect, however, and I sympathize with those in my class who are happy to have this part of the project behind them.
Omeka
This week’s foray into Omeka has certainly been interesting. While I do like WordPress, and it can be quite useful for certain applications, I’ve found the more metadata focused nature of Omeka to be particularly intriguing. WordPress is very much a blogging platform, while Omeka seems more well-suited to supplying and disseminating a greater level of detail, as can be seen in the extensive metadata options one can add to the automatic Dublin Core set. The native ability to include transcriptions with a object is another feature which I found to be rather nice. So far I’ve merely posted various items from my SpiRIT exhibit (along with their metadata) to our Omeka page, but I’m looking forward to delving further into the possibilities the platform has to offer.
Working with WordPress
So far, working with WordPress to to create a blog-style digital exhibition of my case on the RITMuse blog has been rather pain-free. I have worked with the platform before, but even so, it is generally pretty intuitive, so I haven’t run into many issues. One slight hiccup I did notice, however, occurred when one of my featured images was large, but not so large that it was automatically scaled down on the main page. I was posting about the Letter to the Editor, which is physically about 2″ x 5″. The scanned version’s sized made it look awkward on the main page because unlike the scan of the RIT Reporter cover, it wasn’t quite large enough for WordPress to just auto-scale it down. I spent some time looking through the photo editing options the platform offers, but didn’t find any solutions. I tried to just resize the image to make it larger, to see if that would cause the auto-shrinking to occur, but that was also unsuccessful. Ultimately, I decided to place the image of the clipping on a wider white background, so that it wasn’t so long and thin. This ended up working, as you can see below.
David A. Page (Incidental Learning)
When doing archival research, it’s virtually, or perhaps utterly impossible to go through the investigative process without experiencing some degree of incidental learning. While I’ve been primarily focused on SpiRIT, the live tiger mascot from the ‘60s, I’ve also learned about the students who were involved in bringing SpiRIT to RIT and taking care of him while he was visiting campus.
Take David Page, for example: a student who often dressed up in the tiger mascot costume, who also sat on the tiger committee that was focused on obtaining SpiRIT, and eventually served as one of the animal’s handlers. Page attended RIT as a photography major, graduating in 1966. During his career as a Fine Arts Photographer, Page’s work was featured in national and international exhibits, in addition to being published in a variety of magazines, such as Sports Illustrated. He also received four Printing Industry of the Carolinas awards for his calendars depicting the Eno River Basin in North Carolina.
The RIT Archive Collection maintains various photographs and negatives of Page’s work, including over 200 black and white negatives, an 11″x13″ photograph titled “Irish Tree of Many Faces” (currently on loan to James E. Booth Hall), and a close-up photo showing the face of SpiRIT’s preserved pelt. I actually decided to use a 2013 poster (pictured above), which includes Page’s SpiRIT photo, in my exhibit, after it was brought to my attention by Ella, one of the archive’s staff members. I didn’t immediately realize, however, that the photo had been taken by the same man who served as the mascot’s handler. It’s been fascinating to learn more about the humans who were in SpiRIT’s life, and especially interesting to see the emotional connections that were formed between students and the tiger during his short tenure as RIT’s mascot. Anyone who’s interested in learning about those personal connections should stop by the RIT Museum in about a month, to see the exhibit for themselves.
Cultural Informatics and RIT’s SpiRIT
When ranking the various RIT archives collections which I hoped to utilize for the exhibition project we’re creating in Dr. Juilee Decker’s Cultural Informatics class, I prioritized “Collection on Spirit (Tiger)” above all the other options. Much to my excitement, my preferred choice, which stemmed largely from my love of animals, and specifically my affection for cats, was bestowed upon me during last Thursday’s class. While reviewing the collection in the archive, I discovered that a vast majority of the materials related to SpiRIT came in the form of photographs and papers. While this isn’t particularly problematic, I did want to include at least one or two actual objects in my part of the exhibit, to better connect visitors with the past through the display of tangible, three-dimensional items. While I was speaking with Jen Roeszies about the assortment of materials which I had examined, she informed me that there was another smaller case of materials still in the archive’s storage area, in which I might find additional records that would be of use in my work. As soon as she brought this second case out to the reading room, I began to look through it, in search of anything which might connect to the paper records already laid out before me. Almost immediately, I found an account book (pictured below) which was issued by the Rochester Savings Bank in 1963.
As you can see, this booklet lists many deposits, with the sums shown on the second page ranging from $11 to over $100. On April 23rd, 1964, a significant withdrawal was made, in the sum of $1,000. If I were attempting to determine the meaning of this record, devoid of any contextualizing records or data, then I would likely be at a loss. Thankfully, I had already become aware of the book’s significance, due to information I had gathered while previously examining other materials from the collection. In 1963, a group of RIT students created a committee with the goal of purchasing a Bengal tiger cub, which they wanted to serve as the school’s mascot. These students successfully convinced the school’s Student Council to provide a load of $1,000, with which they then purchased the cub that would eventually become known as SpiRIT. To repay this load, the committee decided to begin selling “stock” certificates, each for $1, which declared the bearer to be the owner of one share of “school spirit and tradition,” in the form of a Bengal tiger. At least two of these certificates can be found in the archival collection; one has the recipient’s name along with the signatures of committee members Jim Black, Denis Kitchen, and Roger Kramer, while the second contains just the signatures. This fundraising initiative was quite successful, and as the bank book shows, the funds necessary to repay the load were soon collected in full.
Thanks to this discovery, I’m already making great progress on my work for the exhibit. I still have part of the second case to sort through, however, and I’m planning to continue that process during tomorrow’s class period. Perhaps, with just a bit more luck, I’ll find another three-dimensional record in the collection, which will further enhance my plans for the display on RIT’s SpiRIT.
Daniel Krull 