What have you accomplished?

• Fixed previous errors within the Text Library of Reports to the Commissioner of Education. There was a mislabeling of years 1891-1892 and 1893 was missing.
• Briefly researched into an affordable book scanning solution to efficiently digitize volumes of books in a time efficient manner ~900 pages an hour
• Provided input into possible revisions to a grant proposal
• Briefly managed an SQL database for better revision management – task was dropped as it would not have been as useful to future project members, the excel table could be exported to SQL, and did not efficiently serve as a revision management solution.
• Created an interactive map with the collected data of archiver locations and notable collections, items pertinent to the research along with contact information
• Currently continuing work on an itinerary of archive holding protestant related archives which would have collections/items pertaining to missions and educations within Alaska between 1876-1902.

Are you meeting the goals for your internship goals?

• I feel like I am lagging behind on my personal internship goals. The work request seems manageable, but many more hours are sunk into the task than I anticipated. Dr. Stone has remained amenable, but I question whether that is objective or out of courtesy – I question my performance but at least it drives me to be diligent in my hours and strive for ways to improve my work methods. 

What have you learned?

• I have learned that organization approach to a project this size is key. It is important to structure your data in a manner which will easily show correlations to elements within the dataset while and inheriting and connecting to additional variables and outside information. In the case of this research this entails displaying correlations between a roster of over 300 educators and potential archive collections and entries and their respective archives. As the project has grown and the amount of interacting data has grown, workflow has become an ever-increasing priority.

Do you need to make any changes to your work habits?

• Work habit adjustments came in the form of work prioritization and organization. Save for the introductory weeks at the semester, work schedule has been rather routine with work consisting of 2-4 hour spans; however, I feel this has impacted the sum of possible work accomplished than what could have been done with longer work periods – say, dedicating an entire day over the weekend.