Page Exhibits

For this next piece of our project we’ll build out a set of exhibits for our scrapbook pages. The goal of these exhibits is to show readers what the items we digitized looked like as collected in the original scrapbook, and to provide readers with some context for items. Each student should complete one scrapbook page exhibit for this assignment. Extra pages may be completed for extra credit (handy if you missed some work earlier in the semester!).

Here’s how to build an exhibit for a page of our scrapbook.

Instructions – Preparing to Create Exhibits

Before we create exhibits, we’ll do some prep work together. We’ll use, you guessed it, a Google Spreadsheet for this.

1. Open up this spreadsheet
2. Add the items you added to Omeka to the spreadsheet. At this time, just add the Page number, item number, title, and link to the item.
3. Choose 3-4 items you would like to research to learn more about their context (if each person does between 3 and 4 items all 101 items should be completed!) Enter your name in the “Student Researching Item Context” column for these items.
4. Research the context for these items using the sources below and your usual Google skills. Try to answer the following questions:
   1. What is this items larger historical context? What larger historical events does it connect to? What does it illustrate about its historical moment?
   2. Why is this item in the scrapbook? Make your best guess about this. Look at the other scrapbook items and the larger history. Try to guess at its significance to Joyce Murrow.
5. Complete the appropriate fields in the spreadsheet for each question above. Add the sources you utilized in the “sources” field.

Resources

• Southern Chester County Yellow and White Pages 1953-1959 – A phonebook, useful for looking up addresses of businesses, and possibly individuals.
• Centennial History of West Chester State College – History of WCU written in 1971. Search it for names of on-campus people and places to learn more context about them.
• Ancestry.com – Use this link to get full access to Ancestry.com via the WCU Library! Use it to look up people you find in Joyce’s Scrapbook and discover more about their lives. Use it after class to look up your Grandparents and stuff.
• Historic American Newspapers – Handy to check newspaper coverage of events around a particular date.
• West Chester Student Newspapers – I’ve linked to the archive page with issues from Fall of 1946, to make it a little easier to find information relevant to Joyce’s time at West Chester
• West Chester Yearbooks – To research classmates etc.

Creating Exhibit Pages

Once we have context for each item we’ll create exhibit pages

1. In the Omeka dashboard, choose “Neatline”
2. On the page that appears click the green “create an exhibit” button at the top of the page.
3. For title enter “Page XX of Joyce Murrow’s Scrapbook” where XX is the number of the page you are working on.
4. For “slug” enter “MurrowXX” where XX is the number of the page you are working on
5. Set “Default Spatial Layer” to “https://dhm280.afamiglietti.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Murrow_XX-1.jpg” where XX is the number of the page you are working on (NOTE: If you didn’t add the page to the full page directory, this WILL NOT WORK, upload ASAP).
6. Click “Save Exhibit”

Marking Up Exhibit Pages

Once we have exhibit pages created, we’ll mark them up with the context information for items.

1. Click the title of your exhibit in the list on the Omeka tab to enter the editor
2. Wait for the image to load in (this could take a few seconds)
3. Click “New Record”
4. For “Title” give the title of an item on the page
5. For “Body” give a paragraph of context based on the item context given on the spreadsheet
6. Click “Save”
7. Click the “map” tab
8. Choose “Draw Polygon”
9. Click on the image to draw a shape marking the item you described in the previous tab, double click when done
10. Click “Save”
11. Click the “Item” tab
12. Use the “Search Omeka Items” tool to find the item you are working on and link it to the marked up page
13. Click “Save”
14. Repeat steps 3-13 for all items on the page