It began with rooting around one winter afternoon last year in search of my trove of bank statements, hoping I’d turn up a checkbook cover to replace the tattered one I’d been using. But then I dug a little deeper because I also felt sure I had a copy of the first deposit slip for my savings account, started at First Citizens Bank in Buies Creek in 1972. Because the closure of that branch had at that time recently been announced, somewhere along the way I thought I’d probably put up some social media post about it, and I like digitizing things when I get a chance as another approach to long-term storage.
But a random box adjacent to my exploration had items that caught my eye: bound copies of the Final Report I wrote in 1989, summarizing the issues and events and philosophy from my year as president of the Residence Hall Association at UNC-Chapel Hill. I brought a copy out of the attic and sat down to read it and got all interested in it again...and dug into other saved files and looked into the current activities of RHA at UNC via their social media. Then I came across a mention from the UNC alumni magazine that the University Archivist had asked that graduates with student organization records share them with the Wilson Library Special Documents Collection.
In the quiet and still-dark of late winter last year, that set me onto a six-week project that wrapped up just as March was coming to an end and spring had at last emerged. I retyped the report (no saved digital version could be located and I probably couldn’t access it anyway after 35 years of advances in technology!). This let me fix a limited number of syntax and word choice issues but also I found myself with more to say, so I added footnotes for clarification, context, or editorializing, and then I also wrote up additional thoughts and included them as a new Appendix.
I pulled out my trove of saved files from the filing cabinet and discovered it’s actually not hard to use my multifunction copier/printer to sheetfeed documents for scanning. Now everything from my term has been digitized.
For somebody who felt like he got to be on the front end of website creation and management in the mid-1990s—and whose skills were not bad at that time—but who long ago got left behind by the enormous advances in coding and stylesheets and scripts, it’s always a delightful but foolish errand to reignite those pursuits. Long ago, I should have gotten a professional website for myself, for instance. But now there is not only a printed version of the updated report; a fully-developed web version of it, with all the supporting material and archived documents, is published for those who are interested enough to dig into it.
A significant shortcoming of my meager web design efforts is that the overall site is not great on a mobile device—I still have a long way to go with responsive design so that the layout adapts to small tall screen sizes. For now, it is pretty decent on a desktop, and that’s where I’ve left it. The original and printed versions were submitted to the Special Collections archivist at UNC-Chapel Hill and they have also archived the digital records.
A digitized report, scanned pdfs of all those documents, and a hunger to re-explore website design? A perfect storm for evening pursuits and whiling away weekend hours for about six weeks when the long end of winter slowly unfolded.
