End of the Semester and End of the Year

Posted December 17, 2020 by William Crouch

Hey everyone. It’s been a long time since I last posted a blog. My semester has been pretty crazy as I imagine everyone else’s has been. Trying to keep up with the election, the pandemic, and continuing classes fulltime has been pretty stressful so I began to limit the amount of time I am on social media each week to basically zero which has been pretty helpful I would say. In my Collective Memory course, our final project was a group presentation on a historical event, person, or group that our understanding of has been affected by the idea of collective memory. My group chose to do our project our Crispus Attucks, the first victim of the Boston Massacre, and how his identity as a runaway slave and martyr helped with the abolitionists and even in the Black Lives Matter protests. In Archival Access, our final project is to create a MARC record and Finding Aid for a collection. We’ve been learning about how to create Finding Aids with XML code and MARC records so that patrons can better access our archives. In Archival Appraisal, our final project is to create a collection policy for a topic that we have an interest in. For my project, I’m choosing to look at how tennis memorabilia is collected through the Wimbledon Museum and the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Rhode Island. 

Once I’m finished with this semester, I’ll be taking three classes in the spring. The first will be LIS439 Preservation Management. It’s gonna be another intensive course similar to what I took over Spring Break last spring. This time it will be over two weeks in January. Another class is LIS 448 Digital Stewardship will help explain how to best properly work with digital materials in an institution. The last will be HIST 576 The American Revolution which will obviously go into many different aspects of the American Revolution like the social and cultural movements during the Revolutionary era. I’m excited to begin what might possibly be my second to last semester at Simmons and start gearing up for writing my thesis next fall. I hope you all are staying safe and have a good holiday break that gives you lots of rest after this very strange year. I’ll see you all in the new year which I’m sure will be a great one!