Author: forbes (Page 2 of 2)

Photo taken by Cara Forbes.

I went into Ramsey Library at UNC Asheville a few weeks ago to make inquiries about the technological services that they offer to students like me and Rosanna. I feel like I stumbled upon a goldmine.

Technology Lending

Ramsey Library offers a technology lending program where students can check out different items at the Circulation Desk. PC laptop computers, HD enviro camcorders, tripods, wireless microphones, transmitter kits, projectors, audio microphones, headphones, projector screens and frames, and audio recorders are all available for borrowing. All items can be renewed for checkout online. One of the librarians told me that the only thing they want that they don’t currently have are go-pros.

Media Design Lab 

The library also offers a Media Design Lab, which, according to their website “is an interactive learning space where students, faculty and staff from all academic departments come to create images, videos, printed designs, presentations, sound, websites and more”. Beginners are welcome and have access to lab assistants who are available to help them through the process.

The Media Design Lab also offers a ton of multimedia software. For instance, the lab includes a scanner, headphones, drawing tablets, and memory card readers. They also have equipment available for format transfer, duplications, and closed captioning video content.

TV Studio 

The TV Studio in Ramsey Library serves in three capacities:

(1) As an interview set.

(2) As a green screen facility.

(3) As a facility to record head shots with a variety of pull-down backdrops.

The studio is scheduled for UNC Asheville faculty, students, and staff and is only scheduled for academic projects.

The room has four wireless lavaliere microphones, a boom microphone, two teleprompters, and three cameras (two Sony HVR-S270U’s and a Sony HXRNX5U). All are connected to a Newtek Tricaster 855 Extreme in the adjacent control room. Programs are recorded in high definition 1920 x 1080i.

Audio Lab 

The Audio Lab gives students and faculty a quiet space to capture audio with the help of a Video Production technical assistant. It houses two sound isolation booths. Recorded files can be saved in a variety of formats and are transferred via flash drive, share drive, or SD card. One booth is equipped with an ADA compatible ramp.

Craft Studio 

Ramsey Library also has a CrAFT (Creativity, Art, Fabrication, and Technology) Studio. It is a space where all UNC Asheville students, faculty, and staff can utilize a wide array of tools. They currently have three 3D printers, two large-form printers, twenty iPad minis, five iPad Pros and Apple Pencils, mobile furniture, and more.

This all definitely makes me proud to be a Bulldog!

As Rosanna and I work on drafting up our contracts for our project, I think it would be useful for us to review all that the library has to offer us in terms of technological resources. I believe it’s safe to say that we have everything we need to create a fantastic website together.

I feel so much more organized now that I have a Trello board set up for me and Rosanna. I just need to figure out how to make it to where Rosanna can add and move tasks around on it herself too. Nonetheless, having a point of reference like that so we can know what we both need to do has made our research process feel less overwhelming.

Rosanna sent me her transcript from the interview she had with Gene, the archivist at Ramsey Library. I made some minor edits to it as I read along.

I still haven’t heard back from Stacia Harris from the Buncombe County School Board. She’s the person I need to contact to get a hold of any documents pertaining to our case that BCS possesses. So far, it sounds like all they have is the written complaint. That’s the impression I got for Susanne Swanger’s email. Hopefully there’s more than that though. I’m not sure what else to do as far as the school board goes.

I got a hold of Ken from Pack Memorial Library. He said that things are super busy on his end, but he can talk to me on Friday. I emailed him back with some times that would work for me. It’ll most likely be a phone interview. He said he’d do some research on check-out statistics for The Bluest Eye.

To my knowledge, Rosanna is getting an interview set up with Eric Grant from Buncombe County.

I was going to get some research done on Toni Morrison for the literary biography page we plan to have on the website for our case study.

I get a feeling I should email Dr. James again about the Toni Morrison interview we were going to conduct with her. It’s not a hot plate item and I know a lot of the classes she’s teaching are pretty research intensive (which creates a lot of work for her too), but I just have a hunch I should follow up about it to make sure we at least stay on her radar.

I know we are technically getting things done, but I feel like I haven’t at the same time. The only comfort I have is that we started this early. It’s a lot of work and everything is going much more slowly than I thought it would originally, but we’ll get it done.

This is the gist of my life right now…

“I have forwarded your email to ‘such-and-such’. We are [blank] and don’t have information on [blank] here for you. However, we can tell you [blank]. But you can contact [name of entity that will send us a similar response later].”

This makes me so glad that Rosanna and I started reaching out to organizations early. Round and round and round we go. Where we stop? Who knows?

However, we have come across some gems of information.

We met Amanda Glenn-Bradley next week to see what she could help us dig up on the challenge against The Bluest Eye. We found some useful information, but it was limited in comparison to what was found on a challenge against The Kite Runner in Buncombe County. I asked Rosanna if she could share the list of resources Amanda found for us so we can compile them into a “master” document of sorts so we can keep everything we find throughout the semester in one place.

And I got an email back from Susanne Swanger, the Associate Superintendent of Buncombe County Schools in response to my request for information:

“Good morning.

BCS follows our policy 3200 and 3210 in terms of supplementary reading materials. This process is critically important as the policy outlines each step during a challenge. When book challenges occur, the local school Media Technology Advisory Committee (which consists of school staff and parent representatives) reviews the book, the purposes of instruction and the parental concerns per policy. That committee makes their recommendation of keeping the book for their school or eliminating the book. The committee removed the book from the 11th grade reading list but kept the book as a possible material for a 12th grade Advanced Placement Lit course. This selection did not come to the county level MTAC committee nor to the Board due to the fact that an agreeable decision was made at the school level.

It would be important to note that the process was followed per policy. This selection was included on a Honors English syllabus that was provided to parents. It is best practice for parents and students to be able to review the syllabus and notify the teacher when there are concerns so that alternative texts can be assigned. Our ELA specialist Eric Grant as well as our lead media specialist, Jennifer Hand work collaboratively to make sure our reading selections are instructionally appropriate for the level of reader.

If you are asking for a public records request for the written complaint, please direct that request to Stacia Harris in our BCS Communications office. Good luck with your project.

Sincerely,

Susanne Swanger”

I also heard back from Ken Miller, the head of adult services at Pack Memorial Library. He’s willing to help us, but he wants more specific questions. I’ll be responding to him once Rosanna and I articulate what exactly we want to look for from the public library’s end.

Rosanna and I met last Friday to discuss the layout of our case study website. She had some really great ideas about how we could organize the webpages. We discussed our writing styles and found that, because of our differences in field, we tend to write differently. So we decided to do what she calls “cross-writing” where we’ll both edit each other’s work until we feel like our overall product sounds like it has some unity. We also went over website theme options and nailed down which one we want to go forward with.

I’m also still trying to get a hold of Dr. James from UNC Asheville to schedule an interview about Toni Morrison.

I still need to set up check lists for Rosanna and I on Trello. That’ll help us get more organized.

In addition, I will begin doing some research on Toni Morrison’s life as an author so I can write up a literary biography to post on our website.

Unfortunately, some sickness hit my household last week, making me unable to attend the interview with the archivist at UNC Asheville. Thankfully, Rosanna was able to meet with and interview him. She is still working on transcriptions. In the meantime, she sent me the audio recording of the interview so I can stay on the same page with her.  I’ll be listening to that as soon as possible.

From what Rosanna said, it sounded like Gene couldn’t find much. However, the little gem that he did find is that the challenge was in North Buncombe High School, so that helps us out a ton. He told us to try contacting the public library in Buncombe County for assistance. I did that and heard back from them today. They told me to try contacting the school board. So I will be sending them an email later today.

Rosanna and I will be meeting with Amanda Glenn-Bradley, another librarian from UNC Asheville. That will take place tomorrow morning. She already knew about our project since I talked to her about it while meeting her about my senior thesis research earlier this semester. I happened to run into her a few times today and it sounds like she has found some things that will be useful to us in our case study, so fingers crossed!

Rosanna and I both agreed that if we can’t find much on the case to use for our project, we will research it a little more broadly. In other words, we’ll look at it at either a more national or regional level. We’ll make sure we exhaust all of our resources at the local level before we go that route though.

I’m also coordinating a time to set up an interview with Dr. Deborah James, a Toni Morrison scholar who happens to teach at UNC Asheville. She is willing to meet with us and just wants to know more background about the challenge that recently happened with The Bluest Eye in Buncombe County.  I’ll be sending her the articles I have found so far and getting the meeting time finalized. Rosanna and I will brainstorm interview questions together.

Speaking of collaboration, we’re also meeting each other later this week to start working on our website so that we can get a head start on it.

We’re also going to check out the newspaper resource that Cathy sent us and try using Trello to get more organized in our project management for this  project.

Finally, Rosanna and I discovered that she’s been blogging more on the censorship side of things for our individual blog posts while I’ve been tending to blog more about updates. That was not planned, but we figure it creates a pretty good balance as far as our content. So that was a pleasant surprise.

Utilizing the same space to attend video conferences for class has been useful to us as far as being able to communicate with each other after the sessions are over, so we will be keeping that up.

It has been an interesting past few weeks full of running around and “digging”, so to speak, but hopefully we will start making more headway with Amanda tomorrow.