If last week was about me figuring out what the heck I’m actually doing, this week was about me figuring out just how to do that.
I had a difficult time deciding where to start with my indexing, because while I did narrow my project to the 1960s, that’s still ten years and a lot of issues of The Trail. So, I took a step back and situated myself in the larger context of the 1960s by making a highly technical and accurate timeline.
Yeah, that clearly took me a lot of time to make…
However, it was a very useful place to start. Now that I have these dates nailed down, and in an easily referenced place, I can look for parallels or stories about the events in The Trail.
Not that the timeline came in handy when I actually started indexing; I pretty much just chose a random article on the front page of the issue from November 6, 1963 and indexed out from there. In hindsight, there was a much more natural place to start: October 2, 1963. It would have been more logical in a variety of ways; in addition to being the first issue in the 1963-1964 school year, it was the published the day after John F. Kennedy visited Tacoma and it has a lot of material on him, including descriptions of his speech and student opinions on what he said. But you live and you learn, right?
The indexing itself is going much smoother than I anticipated, and I’ve been getting through two or three issues each day! Way better than I thought. I will have to do a lot of cleaning up at the end of the summer (and figure out how to actually find Library of Congress headings for all of these), but for now this is great progress.
Perhaps the greatest (worst?) thing I learned this week is that Microsoft Excel is not infinite. Since I was a child, I have believed that Excel would just go on creating rows and columns forever and that it didn’t have any end. Well, young Jillian, behold:
I have found the last possible cell in Excel. That highlighted one in the lower right corner. It’s kind of a letdown, and young Jillian is very disappointed.
If I actually reach these limits this summer, it will mean that I’ve been a little too enthusiastic with my use of subject headings.
By Jillian Zeidner