Week 12: Organization

 

          Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. If you did not read the first entry of mine, my name is Hiram Davila. I am a student at the University of Central Florida and will be graduating this semester. This blog post will be following my internship with RICHES Digital Archive throughout the Spring 2023 semester.

          This week I really delved deep into the assignment I was given. The assignment is just to organize all our oral histories in the database by ones where the interviewee is African America. Looking through all the videos and items on YouTube and the archive, there are over 200 items that I am looking through. Generally, not all of the items are oral histories, but it gives you an idea of how many things I am looking through.

          There is really not too much to report in regard to my assignment. I have only encountered two problems thus far. I have been organizing my data into an Excel sheet. The first problem that I came to was aesthetics. While it does not change functionality, I wanted my spreadsheet to look “cleaner” and nicer to look at. I did not what to have to be staring at bland cells the whole time I was working on this.

          I am technically certified in Microsoft Office, but I have not retaken my certifications in years. So, I took some time and watched some videos about how to spice up my spreadsheet. I am glad to say that with minimal changes its looks a lot better and easier to look at.

          The next problem was more of an issue that needed to be addressed. The cells in a spreadsheet can hold infinite information, but only a certain amount will be seen without clicking on the cell itself and expanding it. My assignment calls for me to write the description of every oral history, so some of the cells held a lot of information that needed to be seen without clicking on each individual cell. I was having trouble because I could change each individual cell size, but it made it look more clunky. Trying to find a solution, there was an option called “fit content to cell”, but for some reason it was not working. I had to try and find a workaround for that, an I successfully did it. Now, no matter how much information I put the cell will auto-change itself to make sure all the content can be seen.

          I hope to finish this assignment in the next two weeks and then I will be focusing on my presentation for the internship fair. Thus far, I cannot recommend RICEHS as a place to intern. Especially if you have an interest in public history, this is an internship that puts you in positions to learn about your local community and lets you observe the process an archive goes through when collecting, recording, and storing its data.