Similarly to others reviewing the members of the Scottish Chapbooks I can still not find the website with their final project. Therefore, I will review the material from Adrienne’s presentation with the chapbooks group.
As a member of the team who chose to digitize a collection of Scottish Chapbooks for their project, Adrienne decided to focus her area of study on fairy tales present in the chapbook collection. As the semester has come along and we have learnt more about the Scottish chapbooks, I have found them more and more interesting. With this project becoming part of the Universities library website, it is interesting to see how our class work fits in to the bigger picture of the University. I never imagined a project undertaken by students in class would contribute so much to an area of study unique to the University of Guelph. I say it is unique to the university because as we learnt during the presentation, the digitization of these numerous chapbooks is a pilot project here at the University of Guelph.
I found Adrienne’s focus on fairy tales in the chapbooks very interesting. She explains the evolution of fairy tales on her area of the website. An interesting note on fairy tales that I was not aware of before hand was their original purpose. I always believed fairy tales were happy stories told to cheer up children but in reality they began as ways to promote good behaviour amongst children. The evolution of fairy tales as stepping-stones from then to now was also explained on Adrienne’s webpage.
One problem the group talked about a lot during their presentation, were their frustrations with Omeka as a web design program. All members of the chapbook team wanted to be able to provide a link to the full version of their chapbooks. However, Omeka and its strict formatting ways did not allow them to do so. Adrienne and other group members explained the frustrations with the many limitations Omeka put on their ability to display images and text in the style they wanted. Not being able to provide a link to the full text was seen as unfair to the site user. The group believes the full text is very important to the understanding of the information they are trying to explain on their website. The group was again unhappy with the Omeka software that they had to use, as the inputting of metadata was a very time consuming and repetitive task that could be avoided with other software. However, as Adrienne pointed out during the presentation, when the proper links are provided to the full text and the information on the web page is narrowed down the site will improve drastically for the users.
The group seemed to be very collaborative and each member played an equal role in the creation of the chapbook project. They mentioned the how collaboration was a big part of their successes as they all helped each other with different aspects of the project. Overall, I would say the chapbook project was very well done. I am excited to see the final product and hope their presentation at the Scottish Colloquium went well!