jamessilveirablog

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Week 15 Blog: The End of The Beginning

Hi blog, and believe it or not, welcome to my final blog post… I know… time flies! This internship has been an absolutely amazing experience, and I can not wait to continue my time with this project next semester. Now on to what I did this past week; I worked on PRINT on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

On Sunday, I told Kailey I finished my second batch, so she assigned me the batch she is currently working on, documents 1248-1399. Now, we will just go back and forth cleaning up letters in the same batch until it is completed. This batch is interesting because it is the complete opposite of my second batch. My second batch has Stadsarchief abstracts but no translations, whereas this new batch has translations but no Stadsarchief abstracts. Having access to both would be the ideal scenario, but I much prefer having access to the translation instead of Stadsarchief, so this new batch is exciting.

On Tuesday, I continued working on the new batch and attended the usual team meeting. On Wednesday, while working on Endnote, I came across documents that needed to be separated, and since I have not been taught how to make new documents on Endnote, Kailey told me to just make a new row for it in the document tracker. Speaking of the document tracker, since this is my final blog post, I thought it would seem fitting to go over what I do after I finish cleaning up an Endnote document.

The first image is the document tracker. After I am done with a document, I fill in the tracker with its document type, language, and whether there is a transcription and a translation available. Then I fill in my initials and the date I completed it. This is the new batch, so that is why Kailey’s initials and my initials are going back and forth. The rows left blank are the rows I previously mentioned that we created because some of the documents should be split up. We also skip any document that is not correspondence because it is not a priority as of right now. The second image is my task log. It is basically the document tracker, but it is less formulaic and more personal, and I am able to go into more detail about a document if needed.

That is all! I have learned so much about digital archiving and organization throughout my internship journey. I got exactly what I wanted out of this, and I am so grateful to have this opportunity and the amazing group of people at PRINT that have completely supported me every step of the way. This is the end of my internship, but the beginning of my time at PRINT. Thank you so much for sticking with me this past semester, and I guess… I won’t see you next time! Wish me luck! Bye!!!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 14 Blog: The New Batch

Hi blog, welcome back! When I walked into CHDR (PRINT’s home) on Tuesday to start working on the internship for the week, Kailey assigned a whole new batch of Endnote documents for me to clean up, so I finished the last bits and pieces of my first batch and started cleaning up the new batch. I was ready to dive into LOD full-time after finishing my first batch, but from my minor experience with LOD, I definitely prefer Endnote cleanup, so I feel good about SAA focusing more on Endnote than LOD… for right now. I would happily work on anything PRINT assigns me, but everyone has their preferences, and mine is Endnote!

Continuing my day on Tuesday, while I was working on my new batch, 1866-1891, I realized that none of the letters had translations in any of the SAA books… meaning the only source I could draw from to pick out keywords and clean up these letters on Endnote is from the mini abstract that Stadsarchief provides. These abstracts are usually only one to two sentences long, so they are very vague and hard to pick out multiple keywords from. The pro is that I can fly through this new batch since I do not have much to work with, especially since there are only 25 documents in it as well. I cleaned up 1866-1873 on Tuesday. Letter 1872 seemed to be written in the Frisian language… I have never seen this before so I will ask Kailey about it next week. Other than that, these letters were a breeze to get through!

On Wednesday, I cleaned up 1874-1891, meaning I completed my first run-through of the new batch already. I told Kailey that I would probably finish it very quickly since none of them have translations, so I will do a second run-through next week and let her know I am practically finished! On Thursday, I played around with LOD to keep familiarizing myself with it.

It is ironic how I planned to go over how I find information in the 4 SAA books and Stadsarchief in this blog post since I have not needed to use any of the 4 books this week. Still, the first image is one of the 4 books and the second image is Stadsarchief. In the books, I have access to the translation in English which shows the date, sender and receiver, etc. so I can easily get all of the information I need. As I previously stated, the Stadsarchief abstract is a sentence or two long so sometimes it can be a bit difficult. The example I attached, letter 1866, has a one-sentence abstract, so the only keyword I picked out is “administration - religious’ since it mentions an interaction between two congregations. It is pretty self-explanatory, but I hope you enjoyed it! See you next week!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 13 Blog: The Second Go Through

Hi blog! Week 13 was a very satisfying week. I worked on PRINT on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. On Tuesday, I caught up with Kailey on a bunch of questions I had pertaining Endnote and it was very productive. After that, we attended the team meeting as usual. During the meeting, Brendan went over his guide to doing research for LOD, and since he is a part of the SAA team, he obviously used the SAA guide for LOD so it was very beneficial for me. After the meeting, I played around with LOD again and studied a little bit about how to format information on the LOD spreadsheet.

On Wednesday, I spent 4 hours on my second go through of Endnote and it was one of the most satisfying days I have ever spent at PRINT. Going back to the documents I skipped and being able to complete them with my current knowledge was very pleasing. I worked on 9 documents, 1483.02, 1483.02_nld, 1469.01, 1468.01, 1457.01_nld, 1456.01_nld, 1453.01_nld, 1452.01, and 1452.02, and I only have a little left to go. I have now completed 99 documents on Endnote. On Thursday, the usual Transcription Thursday was canceled so I just practiced a bit more on LOD with Hans Burckholder.

Until the end of my internship, I will use these next 3 weeks (I can not believe there are only 3 more weeks left) to go over my process of doing Endnote with you all! I have attached a closer look at what a document on Endnote looks like. My job is to clean it up and make sure everything is filled out correctly. I mainly only have to fix the sender, sender place, receiver, receiver place, document type, language, religion, keywords, whether it has a translation or not, and extra research notes. Sometimes some of these things are filled in correctly, but most of the time they are not. To find out what I need to fix, I mainly use information that I find in the 4 SAA books that I have mentioned before. Lowry III is the book I use the most, but sometimes when it does not have a translation for a specific document, I am only able to use the short abstract that Stadsarchief, the official SAA website, provides. Most of the time there is a translation in one of these 4 books, so it is not too bad. Next week, I will go over where I find the information I need in the 4 SAA books and Stadsarchief, so stay tuned for that!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 12 Blog: The First Go Through

Welcome back blog! Week 11 was spring break so I had the week off, but week 12 was very productive! I worked on PRINT on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. On Sunday and Monday, I worked on Endnote, specifically documents 1490-1500. I finished my first go through of the batch of documents I was assigned to clean up for my internship. I was assigned the last batch of the SAA letters we have in our database, documents 1400-1500. Now I am going back and going over the documents I first started with and fixing them with the Endnote experience I have now. I also entirely skipped some documents that were too complicated so I will go over those as well. I recently realized I have never shown my setup when I work on Endnote, so here it is! I will go into it in more detail next week. I find Endnote satisfying and I love organizing, so hopefully I do more of it after the completion of my batch.

On Tuesday, I started the second go through of my batch. I have gotten a lot better with keywords and it is the main change I have been making in my second go through. I worked on three documents I skipped on my first go through, 1483.01, 1456.01, and 1457.01. I specify them with a “0.1” because these documents have multiple versions in them. I skipped over them because they are not regular documents with multiple versions. They are messy multiple versions. I am still unsure of how to clean up these messy versions, so I am planning on asking Kailey for help next week. Then, I attended the usual Tuesday team meeting. During the meeting, we went over LOD a little more. After the meeting, I played around with LOD a little with one of my favorite writers whose letters I have been cleaning up on Endnote, my man, Hans Burckholder. He was a very old preacher in Gerolsheim, Germany, and he was a very emotional man in his letters. He worked so hard for the betterment of his congregation, so I can not wait to get the hang of LOD and research him properly.

On Thursday, I attended the usual Transcription Thursday workshop. We transcribed a short letter and managed to finish it all in one go. I learned that even the Pembertons in Pennsylvania sometimes write their “S” connecting to the next letter. It was very similar to Dutch handwriting in that aspect, so it is satisfying to see the correlation between the two, and to be able to use my practice with Dutch handwriting for English handwriting. Anyway, thanks for reading! See you next week!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 10 Blog: The Rise of the Guilders

Hi blog! This week went great! I worked on PRINT on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. On Monday, I worked on three regular Endnote documents until Kailey came in so that I could ask her questions about two specific documents with multiple versions. I have worked on documents with various versions before, as mentioned in my week 8 blog, but, this week, I encountered documents 1476 and 1477. 1476 has five versions and 1477 has nine versions. Until this point, I had only dealt with two to three versions in a document, so this was a challenge at first. Kailey was a huge help and we were very productive trying to figure out how to go about these two documents. Both documents are about the Mennonites petitioning the Palatinate Elector to keep the protection money at six guilders instead of raising it to twelve guilders. The Mennonites include past letters that explain why it should stay at six guilders, hence the reason why there are multiple letters/versions in these documents.

On Tuesday, I applied all of the answers I got from Kailey to 1476 and 1477 and finally completed working on them. She is going to go over them next week to make sure that everything looks right. After that, PRINT had the usual team meeting and we went over LOD procedures a little more. I have not mentioned LOD since my week 2 blog, but I will finally be starting it soon. I recommended Hans Burkholder as my first person for LOD since I have been working on his letters for a while now, so hopefully I get to research him soon! After the meeting, PRINT chatted for an hour and it was a great time. I got to talk to Pauline about master’s degree stuff, and Dr. Beiler about courses I should take for my history minor. It was a very informative hour. After that hour of chit-chat, I worked on six more Endnote documents. These were regular ones, so it was a pleasant time after working on the chaos that were 1476 and 1477.

On Thursday, I attended the usual English-language Thursday Transcription meeting. The letter was not too difficult but it was very damaged. I also realized that I have never shown what these transcription meetings look like, so I have attached a photo of it. We all take turns in rotation to transcribe two lines of the letter and type it in the Zoom chat. Even though I enjoy Endnote, it is a nice change from working on it all week. Thanks for reading!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 9 Blog: The Burkholder Betrayal

Welcome back! This week went well, but I have been dealing with an ear infection, which made it rough at times. I worked on PRINT on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. On Tuesday, we had the team meeting per usual, and I saw Brendan for the first time, which was nice! then I stayed until 7 PM to work on Endnote and ask Kailey questions. I had not realized how few questions I had, and the answers were mostly all answers that I thought were the case anyway, so that made me feel good about myself.

On Wednesday, I just worked on Endnote. In the batch of letters that I am working on, I have been keeping up with the letters of a German Anabaptist, Hans Burkholder, and although he is always mainly asking for money from the Committee for Foreign Need, I grew attached to him. I reached a letter that was written 7 years after the batch of letters I had read from him, so a lot had changed since then. The letter broke my heart because it consists of him expressing how sad he is that he does not get a response from the brothers anymore and that they ghosted and betrayed him, how the weather is too cold, and that the war is too rough. He then ends the letter with him talking about how he longs for his life’s journey to be finished so that he can enter into his chamber of rest… It made me so sad, but I wanted to share this on my blog because this is one of the reasons why I love PRINT and this field so much. You get to follow the lives of people and see their progression or decline, and you feel all sorts of emotions while doing this kind of work. Not only are we preserving history, we are learning more about the human experience and what people went through back then, and that is absolutely beautiful.

On Thursday, I attended the usual Transcription Thursday, helping transcribe a letter in English, but after that, I attended the first-ever Dutch transcription workshop! I had been anticipating this for a while now, and it was so helpful! With my experience transcribing Peter Hendricks' letters, I understood some Dutch ways of writing, like how a “Ÿ” is actually an “ij,” etc., but the workshop letter’s handwriting was a lot more neat than Hendricks’, so it was easier. I also recognized some Dutch words because of how often I see them while cleaning up Endnote, like “gemeenten” and “en.” It is very useful, and I can not wait for the next Dutch transcription workshop! Attached is the end of Hans Burkolder’s sad letter. Thank you for reading!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 8 Blog: The Various Versions

Hi! Welcome back to my blog! This week was structurally very similar to last week. I worked on PRINT on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday again.

I was at PRINT for almost 7 hours on Tuesday, the longest I have ever been at PRINT in a day. The day went by quickly, and I managed to clean up the most documents I had ever cleaned up in Endnote at that point. 12 PM to 4 PM was a bit overwhelming because every document I was cleaning up had various versions in it and I was not used to cleaning up various versions, but once I got the hang of it, 5 PM to 7 PM was very productive. I cleaned up documents 1454-1455, skipped 1456-1457 because they needed adjustments that I was told to not worry about, and continued to clean up documents 1458-1459, but because of the multiple versions, I cleaned up 8 versions in total. 1456-1457 really threw me off, but once I got confirmation that these documents needed serious fixing, I felt comfortable letting them go and moved on.

On Wednesday, I beat my record of the most documents I have cleaned up in Endnote. I cleaned up documents 1460-1466, but because of the multiple versions, I cleaned up 10 versions in total. I worked for only 2 hours and managed to hit the double digits! I was so proud of myself, and although I have questions to ask Kailey next week, I think I did a great job. I just realized that last week I posted a picture of a letter that made me giggle but did not explain what the book that held the letter is. The SAA team uses four books that include most of the letters that we work on; ‘Documents of Brotherly Love’ Volumes I, II, and III by James W. Lowry and ‘Letters on Toleration: Dutch Aid to Persecuted Swiss and Palatine Mennonites’ by Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs. These books compile and translate the letters we work on, so they are very useful for the SAA team. Anyway, I attached a video of me reading a letter in Lowry III because it talks about Christian Miller, a poor Anabaptist with 10 children, who happens to have the same first and last name as my friend, so I had to show him who he was in one of his past lives lol.

On Thursday, I just attended Transcription Thursday, and this week’s letter was a lot trickier, but we still pulled through and managed to transcribe a reasonable amount for the hour we were together. As always, thank you for reading! See you next week!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 7 Blog: The Key to Keywords

Hi blog! Welcome back! I went back home this week so I did all of my PRINT hours on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and it was one of my favorite weeks at PRINT! On Tuesday, we had the usual team meeting from 2 PM-4 PM, and then I stayed until almost 7 PM to clean up Endnote. Kailey, Adaeze, and Bree were also there, and it was a fun time working on PRINT with a group of people who could support me while doing so. I went over my keywords with Kailey last week, and it solidified my thought that I had not fully grasped how to correctly choose keywords. There are quite a lot of keywords, so sometimes you miss some or reach too far to add unnecessary ones. This Tuesday, I went over my keywords with Kailey again and I definitely improved this time around, which made me feel more confident about it now. Some might say I might have found... the key... to keywords... (I will definitely go over them again with Kailey next week.)

On Wednesday, I had my midterm evaluation with Dr. Beiler and it made me feel very good about myself and my progression at PRINT so far. There is room for improvement, but that comes with time, and it is so satisfying to look back and see how much I have improved each week so far. Dr. Beiler also offered me a job to continue at PRINT this summer, and of course, I said yes! I love this project and I am so grateful that I get to continue it for the foreseeable future. After the midterm evaluation, I worked on Endnote for an hour, went to class, and then went back to working on Endnote for another 2 hours. I have reached a batch of letters in Endnote that have multiple versions in one document. Some letters have translations, other letters have extra notes and letters added to them. I have never done letters like these alone but I tried cleaning them up on Wednesday anyway, and I think I did a decent job. I will go over them with Kailey next week to make sure everything is correct.

Finally, on Thursday, I attended Transcription Thursday and the letter was a fun, simple one. It was a nice, cute ending to my week. Thank you for reading! Here is a letter that made me giggle because William Frederick Schelling took up 10 lines to introduce himself using an exaggerated amount of titles:

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 6 Blog: The Reveal of 15935

Welcome back to my blog! On Friday, I helped Adaeze with five of her documents in Endnote. We are both new to Endnote, so it is nice to have someone on the SAA team who is also learning its protocols and how to properly work on it. I did not know the answer to every question, but I was there for moral support, and we worked very well together. I can not wait until we both completely get the hang of it and see how far we have come!

Speaking of Endnote, I also worked on documents 1441-1447 by myself this week. I know I said I worked on 1441 and 1442 in my last blog as well, but this week I finally finished them. My biggest challenge with them was, again, how most of the receivers were very vague. In my last blog, my example of the vague receiver was a little easier because it at least mentioned the congregations being in the specific city of Amsterdam, whereas, for example, the receiver for document 1441 was to “the ministers and leaders of the Mennonite congregations in Holland.” Back then, the Dutch used to refer to the Netherlands as Holland, but now Holland is just a region in modern-day Netherlands, so we do not know if these congregations are in the region of Holland or just modern-day Netherlands outside of Holland. I brought it up at the Tuesday meeting and we decided on “Gementeen te Nederlands,” but I will bring it up to Casey, who knows the most about Endnote protocols. I will also go over the keywords I chose for 1443-1447 with Kailey next week to make sure I am choosing them correctly.

Besides Endnote, after 3 combined weeks of working on it by myself and with numerous other people, I finally finished transcribing the 15935 Peter Hendricks letter. It has been the biggest challenge I have ever faced at PRINT, but it had a satisfying conclusion. I hopped on a Zoom meeting with Brendan to go over it a little bit, and I will finally email it to Kayla today. It feels good to finally get the basic structure of Peter Hendricks’ handwriting, and I am so proud of myself for transcribing the letter from start to finish. In honor of my completion of the letter I have been yapping about non-stop in these blog posts, here it is, in all its glory:

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 5 Blog: The Beginningnote

Hi blog! This week consisted of me working on my ability to tackle Endnote mostly by myself and it has been productive. I had questions for most of the documents, but I managed to work on some of them without asking too many. I worked on documents 1438-1442 this week, and a challenge I faced was how broad the receivers of the letters were. For example, in document 1440, the receiver is written as “to the ministers of the Baptisim-minded congregations, worthy friends in Holland, namely in Amsterdam.” They referred to a group of people instead of a specific person. It was tricky at first, but then I realized that these are the Amsterdam congregations, which I then translated to Gemeenten te Amsterdam.

That was my biggest challenge by myself this week, but my biggest challenge with help this week was the keywords. I picked out keywords for these documents by myself and then Kailey went over them to remove/add keywords. I definitely need to work on choosing the right keywords, but I think I am doing decent so far. I made a list of questions I need to ask Kailey next week, so I am excited to keep improving on Endnote.

As I stated in my previous blog, I would be tackling my first Peter Hendricks letter, 15935, again this week, and it went a lot better this time. I did not end up finishing it, but Kayla allowed me to work on it next week too. I understand the English-Dutch handwriting of Peter Hendricks a lot better, and I am confident that I will be able to finish it next week. I am planning on scheduling a meeting with Brendan after I finish it so that we can go over the words I was not able to figure out.

This week on Transcription Thursday, a one-hour Zoom meeting where we all take turns transcribing lines of a letter together, we worked on a letter from a Dutch woman who wrote in English, just like Peter Hendricks. I do not know her name, but the writing is a lot neater than Hendricks’. I did catch a similarity between how she and Hendricks write their ST and how they connect the two letters together, but that is the only prevalent similarity I caught. She misspells some words, but Peter Hendricks misspells many words, and with the mixture of Dutch and English handwriting, it can be tricky to transcribe, so I am proud of the progress I have made so far. Thanks for reading!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 4 Blog: The Redemption of Peter Hendricks

Hi, and welcome back! I feel so proud of myself this week. Last week, I did not do so well on my first Peter Hendricks letter, letter 15935, so I was pretty nervous about transcribing my second Peter Hendricks letter, letter 15962, this week. Although this week’s letter took me 4 hours to complete, I was able to transcribe it in its entirety. At Tuesday’s meeting, Dr. Beiler asked me if it was because I had practice with the first Hendricks letter or if it was simply easier, and I think it was a mix of both. 15962 was a lot easier for me to read over 15935, but I also think I would have struggled with it if I had not practiced with the first letter. Hopefully, by the next couple of letters, I will be able to transcribe in less than 2 hours. I went over 15962 with Brendan on Wednesday and it was a highlight of my week. It felt good to understand Dutch handwriting a little more this time around. Peter Hendricks redeemed himself for me, and now we like him.

Besides my productive work on transcription this week, Endnote also went well. Before I dive into my week with Endnote, keep in mind that PRINT weeks start on Friday and end on Thursday instead of the usual Monday through Friday. Anyway, up until this week, it was mainly Kailey working on Endnote while I observed her. On Friday, we switched places and I was the one working on Endnote while she observed and helped me. On Tuesday before the PRINT meeting, I worked on an Endnote document all by myself and asked Kailey questions about it afterward. After the PRINT meeting, Kailey, Adaeze, and I worked on Endnote together and it was another highlight of my week.

I understand the basic Endnote protocols by now, but I know there is still so much I have yet to learn. More often than not, each document I work on has a new protocol that I had not known about, which can seem overwhelming, but I am encouraged to ask questions about what I am unsure of, so it does not feel too intimidating. My goal is to work on Endnote all by myself without needing to ask questions, so hopefully I can achieve that next week. Speaking of next week… I am going to try and transcribe the first Peter Hendricks letter again… letter 15935… so... wish me luck!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 3 Blog: The Great Letter

Welcome back! This week felt like my first official week at PRINT. Last week, I got the gist of what I will be doing this semester, so this week I started to dive into the project. I have been working on Endnote with Kailey, who will be helping me the most on the SAA team, and Adaeze, who is helping with SAA, also joined us on one occasion. I am starting to get the hang of Endnote, and after a couple of more sessions with Kailey, I will feel comfortable enough to try it on my own. Endnote has been going well, but I can not say the same for my first letter.

In my last blog, I mentioned how I was struggling with my first Peter Hendricks letter. I spent over 2 and a half hours on it and was not even halfway through it. I was advised to only take an hour and a half with letters, so I stopped working on it and brought it to the attention of Kayla, who is one of the team leads for PRINT’s transcription team, and Brendan, who has the most experience with Dutch handwriting and SAA. Brendan and I scheduled a meeting to go over the letter together and even he understood my confusion with it. Since there are no Dutch transcription workshops like there are with English and German letters, I learned so much while transcribing it with Brendan. I plan to meet with someone in SAA every week to go over letters in Dutch handwriting until I completely get the hang of it. During the meeting, he recommended that I try transcribing a different Peter Hendricks letter where the handwriting is less of a challenge to understand. Once I transcribe some easier Peter Hendricks letters, we will go back to this first letter I had a hard time transcribing.

It reached the point where Kailey, Adaeze, Brendan, Kayla, and even Dr. Beiler had gotten their hands on the letter. PRINT has a team meeting every Tuesday, so we talked about it. It made me feel better about myself and my transcription skills because I was not alone in struggling with it. Even though this letter was an intimidating introduction to Dutch handwriting, and I spent about 4 hours on it in total, working on it with people and figuring it out together was the highlight of my week. Once we got into the momentum of understanding it, it was fun figuring out all of the words and Peter Hendricks’ confusing but interesting way of spelling them. Thanks for tuning in! Let us see how this next letter goes!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 2 Blog: The Overture

Welcome back to my blog! This week felt like the overture of my internship. It consisted of me learning the basics of what the semester will be like, and I am slowly but surely understanding my role at PRINT. In my last blog, I said I would go into more detail about it so this is that. To reiterate, I will mainly be cleaning up documents in a database called Endnote, while also transcribing letters. I received my internship workplan from Dr. Beiler, and I learned that I will be working with Linked Open Data (LOD) more than I thought. I am up for anything so I will happily take it on.

I will be working on Endnote, transcription, and LOD. I am still learning, but from my understanding thus far, Endnote is a database that is home to the skeletal metadata of the letters PRINT works with. Endnote includes important identification of letters such as the sender and receiver, the date it was written, and keywords so that letters are easier to find. I am responsible for documents numbered 1400-1551. My job is to clean up these documents, making sure people and place names are standardized and correct, proper protocols are being followed for how Endnote should be structured, and that all documents have at least one keyword. Organization is crucial to cleaning up Endnote.

Moving on to transcription, this is what I have the most experience in, as I volunteered for PRINT last semester solely learning how to format and transcribe letters. The thing is, those letters were in English with English handwriting. This semester, I am working with the Stadsarchief Amsterdam Archive (SAA) team, so I will be trying to transcribe letters in Dutch. I do not speak Dutch so this is definitely a challenge, but again, I am up for anything. This week, to ease me into it, I was given a letter to transcribe by Peter Hendricks, whose native language is Dutch but he also speaks English, so when he writes in English, he does so in his Dutch handwriting. He is the perfect starting point for Dutch transcription, but I am not used to how the Dutch write their letters, so it was a struggle to transcribe. When I get the hang of it eventually, which I will try my best, I will transcribe letters in the actual Dutch language. 

Now on to LOD, this is the term I am least familiar with. I only know the basis of it being more in-depth research on the people in the letters PRINT works with. I would be reading research files and filling in spreadsheets with the information I learned about these people. It is not the priority of my role in the SAA collection, so I have much to learn about it.

Thank you for reading my blog this week! That is everything I will be doing this semester at PRINT, and I will try not to feel too intimidated by it since I have people all around me on this team who can help me out. It is one of the reasons why I was determined to pursue an internship here, so I know I am in good hands.

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 1 Blog: The Introduction

Hi, welcome to my blog! My name is James Silveira, and I am a junior at UCF working towards my bachelor's degree. I aspire to be a film archivist, so I am studying film as my major and history as my minor. After my bachelor's, I plan on pursuing my master's degree in archival studies or library sciences. I am fascinated by film reels and the digitization of it. I find myself drawn to the historical and technical side of film more than the production and Hollywood glamor side of it. I hold cinema very close to my heart, and my dream is to preserve the art of film as my career.

I came across the P.R.I.N.T. (People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel) project while researching archival-related internship and volunteering opportunities at UCF. PRINT traces and transcribes the letters of European religious minorities, such as Anabaptists, Quakers, and Pietists, and their migration flows in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. PRINT's goal is to make these letters and transcriptions accessible to everyone, helping preserve history for researchers and future generations. I sent an email to one of the founders of PRINT, Dr. Beiler, expressing my interest in the project. She was nothing but warm and welcoming, so I volunteered for PRINT throughout the fall 2024 semester in hopes of interning in the spring.

It is now the start of the spring 2025 semester, and I officially have an internship with the PRINT project. Transcription and document organization are skills that aspiring archivists should become well versed in, no matter the archiving field they want to pursue. This internship is a fantastic opportunity for me to understand the foundation of historical preservation and to learn even more about how important it is. After a semester of peaking into a project I have become so interested in, I am eager to finally fully dive into it.

For this semester, I will mainly be cleaning up documents in a database called Endnote, while also transcribing letters on the side. I will go into more detail about this in my next blog, so stay tuned for that. I hope this internship grants me some necessary skills I need to become a film archivist, and I hope I have fun doing so. There is a film scanner in the PRINT meeting room (which I have used and loved the time I spent with it), and whenever I take a glance at it, I see what my future holds, and I am immensely proud of myself for getting to be in the same room as it in the time to come.