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.