Oral History and Irving Archives Website updating

July 23, 2018

Oral History Tapes
Photo by A. Blythe, 2018

Monday, July 23

Today, I worked on transcribing some of the Oral Histories that the Irving Archives holds. I finished transcribing Bob Nelson's interview however I noticed that the cover of the tape did not have both interview dates on it. I put it aside so I could ask Kevin if I could write the second date on the tape cover. I put that tape aside and went to retrieve another tape. The next tape was on George B. Nicholas, who was a World War I vet. I went to the main Oral History file and searched for his transcribed interview. I could not find it, therefore I asked Chris about it since this was the first tape I came across that did not have a transcribed interview to go with it. Chris asked me if I looked in the Oral History main file and the folders around. I replied that I did; then Chris showed me an Excel spreadsheet with all of the Oral Histories entered. He located George B. Nicholas's name on the Excel spreadsheet and confirmed that there was no interview transcription for him. He told me to put it aside and ask Kevin about it. I started working on another Oral History interview, Doug LePori, and Kevin came by to see if I had any questions and he told me that he called someone to assist him in getting the software on the Irving Archives working.

I continued to work on transcribing Doug LePori's interview and Kevin came by to tell me that someone would be coming by to assist with the editing software for the website. I was still working on the interview when Kevin came and asked me to log off the computer because IT was going to install FireFox on all three computers in hopes that the webpage editing software would work since it obviously didn't like Microsoft Explorer. Once FireFox was installed Kevin and I logged into the editing software of the Irving Archives and everything worked! I was excited because that meant I could upload the finding aid for Collection 96, the collection I have been working on. I asked Kevin how often the website is updated and he told he that it is usually updated every six months. I then I asked him about how many collections are processed within six months. Kevin replied about two but he, also, told me that any accessions that occured during those six months would be entered on the website, as well.

There were several things that had to be updated on the website. The first thing was to combine the abstracts from the six boxes listed under the Las Colinas Women's Association into one. Then the accession numbers were removed and "Collection 96" was typed in their place. One thing I experienced that I remembered from one of my classes was when I uploaded my finding aid there was no particular order to the documents. This reminded me of a couple of assignments where I had to create a collection, I had a certain order in processing the items but the program didn't keep them in the order that I had wanted. Once the finding aid was uploaded there was no order in the finding aids except for the order from the program. The finding aid was uploaded but every time Kevin and I would click on the link the website would open the finding aid in Microsoft word which was not what was wanted. We finally figured it out that the Save in PDF box had to be checked for the finding aid to open correctly on the website. The web address for this is https://cityofirving.org/1896/Collections-Guide. Once there, click on the tab K-L, then scroll down to Las Colinas Women's Association and click on Collection 96 to see the finding aid for it. Once the finding aid was uploaded, linked to the the Collections Guide then we moved to the Processed Collections.

The Processed Collections is the part of the Irving Archives website that displays the collections that the Irving Archives have. There are 96 collections in total. Each entry shows the collection number, title of collection, dates span, abstract, donor and size. There were two collections missing on the website so I got to enter them on the website editing software before I entered the collection I had been working on. All of the collections are hyperlinked to their finding aids, as well. The link for the Processed Collections is https://cityofirving.org/1867/Processed-Collections then scroll down to the end of page. Once those collections had been entered, Kevin introduced me to the next part of updating the website.

The last part that needed to be entered on the website was the accessions that the Irving Archives have received. Kevin told me that there are a lot records that need to be entered and I offered to assist in entering the records on the website. The easiest way to enter the records is to look at the handwritten accession record to retrieve the donor, description of the collection and the accession number. I worked on entering those records for the remainder of the day.

Side Note:
I didn't realize how time consuming it was working on updating the website. I understand why Kevin and Chris update the website every six months for it is very tedious, as well. I, also, discovered that if one is not careful one can do a lot of damage to the website. I did something (I wasn't quite sure what or how I did it) and made all of the records on the website disappear. Kevin thought I had deleted/ crashed the website but we refreshed the page and everything was still there. What a relief!