My last week at the Virginia Room once again consisted of digitizing materials. This time it was digitizing the postcard collection. These postcards are of various locations around Roanoke including the city, Salem, and Mill Mountain. The collection itself spans over many years and it is easy to see the changes that the area has gone through. The post card collection itself includes postcards of Smith Mountain Lake, Shawsville, and other places around Roanoke. These were not digitized because they were not used as often, and there would just too many to digitize at one time. It is important to digitize this collection because it is one that could be used often as a reference when doing larger research about the area.
The process itself is one I have done many times at the Virginia Room, but it is an important one to go through to get as much information as possible out to the public especially if they cannot make it into the Virginia Room.
The next task I got to preform was entering the data from an index. The news articles by Raymond Barnes are some of the best reference to the history of the Valley. Digitizing these articles would be extremely helpful to the people trying to do any kind of research (there is even an article on napkin rings) whether it be about an event or trying to trace one’s genealogy. Typing all the data from the index into a google doc is time consuming often feels like there is no end in sight. Barnes covered many different topics and people. The articles were mostly written in the 1960’s with a few in the late 1950’s and early 1970s. There are hundreds (I lost count somewhere after the Lewis family) of articles and the process itself has taken the whole week to accomplish. Once these articles are in the computer it will be easier for people to find the person or event they are looking for.
