The James Monroe group created two separate websites. The first site, the James Monroe Papers website, was created using Contribute following Dr. Preston’s specifications. We did meet with Jerry to learn how to use Contribute, and following his suggestion, most of the actually uploading through Contribute was completed by Kelly, who had Contribute on her computer. We completed the site by the specified deadline, although there were several items Dr. Preston asked us to tweak or changed his mind about later. Most of his later corrections could not actually be accomplished.
As a group, we did not always maintain our status updates using Google Document work breakdowns, contrary to the contract. However, we worked to keep everyone up to date through blog posts and emails. We found we had problems with the work breakdowns because they were so similarly titled and people were often confused about which document was which. We also had problems with the work breakdowns because they did not allow for items that were finished but being tweaked or had stages beyond “not finished” or “finished” even with the comments section.
By February 15, we did have some direction for what we wanted to accomplish with our website, the James Monroe website. We were able to stick to our deadline of March 20 to complete all of our scanning of the National Archives microfilm of Monroe’s Ministry to France. We also completed our timeline on schedule, although Kelly continued to work with the HTML after the data entry and basic timeline was completed to improve the basic outline. We did not complete the Omeka uploads until April 3rd, which was rather behind schedule, largely because we did not finish converting the files until March 31st. This delay was largely because we ran into problems converting the files. Apple Photoshop (which was on the Macs in the Theater Department) did not have a clear “Batch Conversion” option. It was only after talking to DTLT and using the Microsoft Photoshop that we could figure out how to convert the scans from TIFF to JPEG files. The descriptive pages on Monroe that I had control over, being “Monroe’s Ministry to France,” were up before April 4, but we were still adding citations and working on the video after April 4 to pages I did not work on or have any control over.
I completed the file conversions, uploaded to Omeka, and completed three-fifths of the Omeka metadata on my own. I also helped with the corrections to the problems in the Omeka exhibits and metadata. I really wish we began the scanning process slightly earlier and started the metadata much earlier, with more people working on it. Because the metadata was so integral to the website, it was not something that should have been left to the last minute. However, most of the metadata required images to be uploaded, so it could only have been completed sooner if we began by partially uploading items as they were scanned. This might have been a better approach.
As contracted, we used WordPress to create our site, Omeka to upload our documents, and Moviemaker to create a mashup on Monroe’s life. We created our required timeline using a Google Spreadsheet placed into Simile. We did not use Voicethread for our transcriptions, but we did use Dr. Preston’s guidelines which were provided much later than we expected. The contract was never changed to reflect this delay, as with many of the other delays.
Overall, our group did not do a good job of keeping the contract and work breakdowns up to date with the problems we ran into.
