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From January 4, 2016, through March 30, 2016, I worked on two projects at the Ohio History Connection in Columbus, Ohio. The larger of the projects involved the evaluation, inventory, sorting, and to a lesser extent, description of unprocessed archival material from the Anti-Saloon League (ASL). The ASL was the powerful lobbying organization which ultimately succeeded in ushering in prohibition through the Eighteenth Amendment.

The second project involved enriching digital objects from two World War I collections with Dublin Core metadata in a CONTENTdm environment. I also digitized many of the documents from the smaller collection. This digital initiative is the subject of a session being presented at the 2016 annual conference for the Society of Ohio Archivists.

Practicum Summary

Practicum Student:

Rachel Dilley

MLIS Candidate

Kent State University School of Library and Information Science

Faculty Advisor:

Catherine L. Smith, Ph.D.

Kent State University School of Library and Information Science

Practicum Information

Spring Semester, 2016

Practicum Supervisor:

Travis Kokas, MLIS

Printed Materials Cataloger

Ohio History Connection

800 E. 17th Avenue

Columbus, Ohio 43211

Origins of the Practicum

About the same time I had contacted Beth Weinhardt about practicum possibilities, I had also inquired with Lily Birkhimer, who is the Digital Projects Coordinator at Ohio History Connection. I met Lily through a family connection, and at her suggestion had joined the Digitization Interest Group, which meets every other month do discuss digital collection topics. Lily indicated that OHC had obtained a NEH grant to gather, digitze, and make available Ohio institutions' collections for a World War I centennial commemoration. OHC already had an in-house physical collection which fit well wtihin the WWI grant project. She indicated that an OHC employee would digitize selected items from the collection, but that she would like for me to enter the Dublin Core metadata for each item so that they could ultimately be shared through OhioMemory.org.

Both the ASL project and the WWI digitization project came through for me at about the same time, and it was serendipitous that these projects were both tied to the Ohio History Connection.

I obtained the privilege to work on the two projects at the Ohio History Connection from two different contacts. For the Anti-Saloon League project, I had contacted Beth Weinhardt, Local History Librarian at the Westerville Public Library, to see if she had any practicum opportunities. I had met Beth several months before when I visited the Anti-Saloon League Museum, which is housed within the Westerville Public Library. I have been working on my own genealogy for years and have an ancestor who was in the leadership of the Anti-Saloon League. Beth had recently been contacted by the Ohio History Connection (OHC) to see what she wanted to do about an unprocessed portion of Anti-Saloon League (ASL) material belonging to the Westerville Public Library which had been housed at OHC for decades. The unprocessed collections has at least 150 linear feet of material. While OHC already has a catalogued "Temperance Collection" which does contain some ASL material, there remained much of the ASL material which was thought to have post-dated the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and, therefore, was thought to be less important. The timing of my inquiry was right. Beth suggested to OHC staff that they allow me to do a practicum in order to tackle the mountain of unprocessed material.

This Abstinence Wins flier is from the uncatalogued Anti-Saloon League collection.