We have our contract approved! Now it is time to get to work. This week our Civil War diaries group finished scanning all the transcripts we have and we started scanning the diaries. Suzanne Chase has been extremely helpful with the scanning process and helping us use the Cobra, a rare book scanner. She also made a spread sheet on the desktop of the lab computer so we can keep tract of who is doing which diary. I really enjoy using the Cobra but it took a bit to figurer out how it works but I think I got the hang of it now. On Thursday, I got through 37 pages of a diary and Ms. Chase said that I can come in next Thursday to work on scanning the diaries some more. We met with Catherine Perdue at the library and she gave us some great information about plugins for Omeka. She suggested we use the page turner plugin instead of Scripto so we will have to test that out. Ms. Perdue is also going to send us directions on how to use the page turner plugin. She also gave told us about plugins that allow the user to mass enter metadata which will be very helpful because our diary pages are all going to have similar metadata. Our main goal at this point is to get all the diaries scanned over the next two weeks so that we can upload them to Omeka and start testing out these plugins.
