#casey bowler

[iph-interns-2018]

This week I wrapped up my work on the website for the newly titled Virginia Changemakers program, which I have been building for most of my internship. The website has individual pages for each of the Library of Virginia’s programs, which list the honorees alongside a downloadable poster corresponding to their program year. I also used a Geolocation plug-in to display all of the honorees on a map of Virginia, from which users can navigate to individual biography pages. I went through and ensured that all of the item entries are uniform so that they can be sorted properly into eras and themes by PHP scripts, and I’ve made changes to improve the way the biographies are displayed. I’ve worked both through the Omeka admin interface and by editing the server-side files to fulfil the goal of creating a usable resource for teachers and students. Below is the link to the site if anyone wants to check it out!

http://edu.lva.virginia.gov/changemakers/

I have also been working recently on setting up a website to host the Library of Virginia’s many resources on women’s history. This is designed to be a mock-up of the future site, so my priority is creating a usable, attractive, and simple site upon which the Education and Outreach staff can continue to expand. We decided to use Omeka for this project as well, because the admin interface is very straightforward and will allow the staff to input all of their programs and data without having to know how to code. So, my tasks have included setting up the Omeka site on the Library’s server, downloading any plug-ins that they might want to use in the future, and creating a theme to style the website. I will be finishing up these responsibilities as I head into my last week of my internship.

[iph-interns-2018]

In my first few weeks at the Library of Virginia, I have been sorting through the biographies in the Virginia People resource and clarifying their groupings and metadata. This will make it easier for me to edit the scripts that create the website around these biographies, but it has also allowed me to learn about some really fascinating Virginians that have been honored through the Library’s programs.

One such Virginian is Henry “Box” Brown, pictured above. He was born into slavery in the early eighteen-hundreds, and after his family was sold out of Virginia in 1848 he decided to escape to the north. With the help of a free black dentist and a white shoemaker, Brown sealed himself in a wooden crate on March 23, 1849 and was shipped to the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. When he arrived, twenty-six hours later, the crate was unsealed and he emerged a free man. Brown went on to perform antislavery lectures, reenactments of his unboxing, and general entertainment acts until his death in 1897.

I will be continuing to work with Virginia People in the next couple of weeks, and I look forward to making stories like Brown’s more accessible to the public.

[iph-interns-2018]

Hi! My name is Casey Bowler, and this summer I will be interning with the Library of Virginia in Richmond. The Library of Virginia is home to a wide array of Virginia History resources, including educational programs, public events, and expansive physical and digital archives. The Library has an in-progress online educational resource, tentatively titled Virginia People, that I will be refining and upgrading. For this project, I will be working with Omeka to establish a tool for educators and students that hosts information about individuals honored through their Strong Men & Women of Virginia and Virginia Women in History programs, as well as biographies from an earlier program, African American Trailblazers. In addition to working on Virginia People, I will be consolidating the LVA’s resources on women’s history to create a mock-up of a Women’s History in Virginia Portal. I will also work on updating the LVA’s current education website. Most of my work will be carried out remotely, but I plan on commuting to the Library of Virginia on a roughly once-a-week basis. I look forward to reading about the other IPH internships and sharing my progress on refining these online resources!