This week I mostly worked on the index project. Marsha and I talked and she will be sending me information to catalog over the next month. It was a much faster process since Marsha has been providing me with a short summary, timing of interview and key words. Essentially this new process just requires me to plug the information into the Excel sheet with very few edits. I’ve been trying to make sure all variants of key words are included and that every entry has at least these three key words: Eugene history, Eugene and personal history. The most difficult part is deciding what to put as Organization/Topic, because sometimes there is more than one topic discussed in an interview, but I think it’s important to choose a main theme to be put in the title of the entry. This way people can get a general sense of each interview just be looking at the title. I did have to spend some time editing the older informational sheets, but I suspect that process will be more streamlined from here on out.
I do have some bad news: my audio editing class has been cancelled. This means I will basically have to teach myself. However, I have a friend with some audio software that he promised to let me use. We are meeting up this Thursday and he will show me some basics of the program. Hopefully this will be a good launching point to actually editing a story. My hope is still to edit 2 stories this quarter. Depending on how complicated this editing software is, I think it’s still possible. I’ve been holding off on contacting KLCC till I’ve edited a story. This will have to be a conversation that will continue. Perhaps I will work on editing stories this summer and into next year. Marsha brought up the idea that it might be a good idea to clean up the recordings before archiving them at the library. We’ll have to see when this part of the project can be done.