Day Eighteen, 915-1530, Total Time = 113 Hours 5 Minutes

Yesterday's word of the day carried over to today. I spent today scanning again. This is starting to consume too much time. I talked with Bill about my progress in the project and mentioned that I had scanned about 170 photos up to this point. He asked if I had more photos and if I do to have someone in digital production scan the rest. I did have a few left, so I took the remaining photos upstairs for DP to take care of for me. Bill had expressed that I may have too many photos. I explained that I feel the same way, but I have a plan. As I am going through and entering the metadata, I will be even more selective and pick the upper eschelone of photos to tell the Akron story. Then, depending on how much time that takes, the photos that did not make the first cut will be added on a second cut. He liked this plan and hopefully next week I will be able to stick with it.

Day Seventeen, 900-1600, Total Time = 106 Hours 50 Minutes

The word of the day today is scanning. That is what my day was spent doing. I was able to get through the two files that I appraised on Tuesday. After getting through the two files, Goodyear and Firestone, I looked at the clock and my day was done. Upon futher reflection I think that I will have to have a more stringent selection of photos. How many pictures of a random machine do I need?

Day Sixteen, 1100-1315, Total Time = 99 Hours 50 Minutes

I decided today that I was going to tackle the two biggest files dealing with Akron; Goodyear and Firestone. These two files were overflowing with pictures and I could have created a gallery with these two files alone. The first step that I took with these files was to separate the pictures into piles: manufacturing, people, World War II, buildings, and unusable. The unusable pile had photos that only dealt with the rubber company and Akron indirectly. This pile also included any photos that I could not determine what the subject matter was because there was nothing written on the back of the photo, or those that, from contextual clues, I could not determine what the photo was dealing with. WWII was an important pile because there were many materials made in Akron and there is a lot of interest in the subject. From the surveys I found that some people wanted to know more about the manufacturing of tires so this pile was important also. From the piles I picked the best representative shots to best tell the story of Akron. Some of the photos may not be the most interesting, but they do shed more light on Akron.

Day Fifteen, 900-1600, Total Time = 97 Hours 35 Minutes

After learning how to scan and use the photo shop program, I decided to move straight into scanning. This is what the better part of my day was consumed by. As I was going through the photo files I found that for some of the larger folders I had a hard time weeding out some photos. This concerns me because I have only started to go through the Cleveland Press Collection. I still have the Bruce Young photos and the Wilbur Watson collection to scan. I have to keep telling myself when selecting pictures one question, "Does this photo best represent Akron?" I feel that if I keep this in mind, I will be able to create a good selection of photos for the Cleveland Memory Project. I have to do this so I do not run out of time in the practicum.

Day Fourteen, 930-1640, Total Time = 90 Hours 35 Minutes

I started the day by learning how to scan the photos that I will be using for my project. CSU uses Adobe Photoshop CS to scan and edit the photos. The photos are stored in two formats; TIFF and JPEG. The TIFF format is scanned at 600dpi in 8bit grayscale and used for archival purposes. The photos are then recorded onto magnetic tape and stored off site. The JEPG is used for uploading onto Cleveland Memory Project. It is still in 8bit grayscale but instead of 600dpi the resolution is at 72dpi. After learning how to scan and use the program the rest of my day was spent scanning photos. I was able to scan forty-five before the end of the day.

Day Thirteen, 900-1600, Total Time = 83 Hours 25 Minutes

At the start of the day I talked with Bill and he suggested putting in the replies from the lis-serv questionnaire into alphabetical order. This helped to organize and sift the results into a coherent usable list. There were a lot answers that were more modern and not appropriate for this project, but I did ask for modern ideas of Akron to see if there was something from the eighties. Some ideas that came across the e-mails that I did not think of are the Corsair F4U (built in Akron during World War II), Portage C.C., and Firestone C.C. The Cleveland Press did have some photos on Portage and Firestone C.C. but nothing on the Corsair. After I finished coding the results from the questionnaire I continued to go through the folders of the Cleveland Press to find usable photos for the project. This has become more time consuming than I had thought but I cannot just put anything onto the Cleveland Memory Project site. I should be able to finish doing the selection on Thursday and start digitizing on Friday.

Day Twelve, 900-1600, Total Time = 76 Hours 25 Minutes

The survey that I sent out last week had a couple responses so today I started my day by coding the e-mails. Most of the replies were what I had already searched myself; however there were a couple that I had yet to think about, i.e. Christmas Day Parade, Akron Marathon, Hopping Frog and Thirsty Dog Breweries, Lock 3, Rib Fest, and First Night. I looked for these on the off chance that there may be something, but I did not find anything because these are more contemporary examples of Akron. I did not receive as many replies as I had wanted to so I talked with Bill about possibly posting to the Kent State SLIS Lis-serv. He said that he was not too sure on the protocol of posting and suggested that I contact Dr. Zeng. I e-mailed Dr. Zeng and she has several good ideas. First she suggested to not have it worded as a survey but a questionnaire because survey sounds to formal and this should be more like a ‘pre-test’ for finding the data that I was looking to find. She had other suggestions, blog, Facebook, Survey Monkey etc., but after discussing it with Bill we found that for my needs an informal questionnaire would garner the best results. Since sending it out I have received replies from people not just in Ohio but from Arizona, Iowa, Illinois, Canada, and England. I did not expect this to receive so many responses but I am glad because it does give me a global perspective on Akron. Thus far most of the replies have been about what I expected but there have been a few that I did not think about, music and art. I will explore these two topics more tomorrow.

To finish out my day I started to go through the file folders and list one by one the pictures that I will be using for the final product. I found that in the topic of “Airships” there are a lot of photos of various airships flying. Some have the airship’s name and some do not. I think that the project will need only a few photos of the airships flying so some will need weeding out of the project. Though there are a lot of the flying airships there are just as many good representative photos of the airship boom centered in Akron.