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Savannah Willards Social Life of Books site.

Month: April 2017

The Final Countdown #4 – If I add brackets will it work?

April 18, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Coding is hard and B.Pauley is the bomb(dot)com.

I’m actually pretty sure those were the words I used verbatim when working on the timeline this past week, trying to make everything look the way we wanted it. I truly do not know what I would do without Dr. Pauley and his coding genius because my menial knowledge of CSS coding was getting me nowhere.  It was to the point where I was typing anything I could think of and adding brackets to see if it would work!  Ultimately we got it figured out, (thank you Bens!) and the timeline is near-perfection now. I have a couple more slides to finish typing up, still waiting for some information, but it is uploaded on our website now if anyone wants to check it out.

Once that mess was finally fixed, Mary Haynes and I turned our attention back to scanning. We FINALLY finished all of the books for this project after two long nights in the archives, and can now focus on the website itself and getting everything polished.

It is strange to think that we are getting towards the finish-line with this project, it has felt so all-consuming. We only have to edit our interviews and get pages posted, but other than that we are pretty much there. I ironically called this series of posts ‘the final countdown’, but now it’s starting to feel real and I don’t know how I feel about that.

The Final Countdown #3 – Reasons why we should forget the 90’s

April 10, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Here is a list of all things wrong with the 1990s:

  • Glue sticks – I know we were all infatuated with the purple Elmer’s glue stick, thinking it was the best thing to hit us since jelly bracelets, but gee were we wrong. Those suckers don’t hold a thing. Sure they might have for the first year or so these Production Books were put into the archives, but 12 years later? Everything was falling out of these books.
  • Plastic screws – Have you ever had to deal with these? They are little plastic screws that you put into another tubular screw in order to hold something together. If you haven’t, then learn about them now before you have to face them because they are the WORST (If you don’t know what they are, which we did not). It took Mary Haynes and me so long to figure out how these things worked, let alone how to get them unscrewed. I almost broke one because I could not for the life of me figure out how to keep one end from moving while twisting the other. It was awful.
  • Random objects? – There is something about 1994 and gluing random objects into the books for decoration. We saw ribbons, bows, monopoly pieces, cloth dolls, some of the oddest things you could think of. I blame the Gold Side’s circus theme.
  • Plywood covers- You read right folks, plywood. For the covers. Yepp, Purple’s 1994 Production Book was made out of three plywood pieces hinged together to create a book. Believe it or not, that’s one of the most reasonable things these books have been made from before they were regulated.
  • Glitter – All I’m going to say is that Mary Haynes sat down one of the books and glitter shot out. We still don’t know from where.

So in conclusion, knowing that 1994 is one of the more docile years when it comes to the Production Books makes me cringe. There is a reason the College Night committee added a Legacy Product aspect to the Production book scoring in 2003, because these books were not made for preservation. At all.

 

On the plus side, we did get our IRB approval and knocked out one of our interviews! So not all was lost to the 90s woes.

 

The Final Countdown #2 – I need a calendar

April 4, 2017 / / 0 Comments

This past week was Spring Break for us Montevallans (Montevallites?), so there is not much to report from Mary Haynes and me. Although, apparently I need to make more use of my calendar alerts because the break mind-set had me 15 minutes late to class this past Tuesday; I was so scrambled that I had to log in on my phone and participate in class while mooching off a Starbucks’ wifi. Let’s just say I do not think I will make the same mistake again.

That being said, it was not entirely unproductive because we did get our IRB Report submitted. The IRB was not extensive, but it was annoyingly detailed. Of course I understand why it must be that way for high-risk projects, but for simple interviews a lot of it seemed redundant. Because of my Communication Studies major I was bound to run into the IRB reports eventually, so I am glad I got to get familiar with them now. We are still waiting to hear back about it, so updates to come on that.

Now that we are back on campus, it’s time to hit the ground running with this project–and school in general. I feel like I need to make a very intense to-do list for this next month, but I’d be afraid as to what it would look like. As far as this class specifically, it seems like a lot still has to happen but I think most of it is just getting it down on the website. Interviews aside, we have almost all of the information we need for the project, it’s just a matter of writing it out. Mary Haynes and I planning on meeting after class tomorrow to discuss a divvying up of the work, so hopefully that will help–to use a season-appropriate saying–get all of our eggs in the basket.

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