My world used to be the world of the Smith Corona typewriter. I could drive my sainted mother, a skilled secretary since the Depression, from any room with the sounds of my slow typing.

My introduction to working on a computer was in 1994, when I started at the University of Florida’s Interlibrary Loan Department. We went from seven employees sharing one Macintosh connected to the Internet and two dedicated terminals connected to the UF catalog, to a PC on every desk with access to myriad programs, ‘local’ online services, and the Internet.

Dr. Kathleen McCook, from the School of Library Science in Tampa, convinced me to go to graduate school 30 years after I had gotten my B.A. in History from the Catholic and catholic Rosary College in Illinois. And so, two days after my mother’s funeral in January of 1997, I started school in a ‘live’ distance learning class here in Gainesville. Two and a half years of full time work and part-time classes, both Internet and classroom, saw me receiving my M.A.L.S. from the University of South Florida.

But I still type pretty slowly.

 These are some of my HTML projects:

 Ask Aine, An Crosaire’s Agony Auntie

Class:               Internet Resources (Fall 1997) 

Assignment:      Create a web page and demonstrate our HTML abilities by including links and illustrations.

HTML Editor:      We had to do it from scratch: no cheating with editors. 

Description:       My starting point was the biography of the Medieval ‘persona’ I created for the Society of Creative Anachronism and to it I linked four informational columns, “Ask Aine”, I had written for the local Barony’s newsletter. Each column contained two pertinent book references and I added two online sites.

Petals from the Floating World: Art to Wear

 Class:               References for the Humanities (Fall 1998) 

Assignment:      Create a reference page for some aspect of the Humanities

HTML Editor:      Netscape Composer (with tinkering) and uploaded to WEBCT.

Description        I created a page on the history Japanese textiles and costuming. I scanned black and white and color illustrations, manipulated and combined them in MS Paint, and, remembered my first project enough, to fiddle with and correct the HTML language created in Netscape Composer. The results were “Art to Wear.”

 Superintendent of Documents :Classification System

 Class:               Advanced Cataloging (Fall 1998) 

Assignment:      Compare two types of cataloging systems

HTML Editor:      Word

Description:       I compared the Government Document’s classification system, SuDocs, with the more familiar, Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification systems. The page was meant to be simple since I was using it as a teleprompter as I spoke, so I wrote it in Word, added a couple of images from the UF Gov Docs page and saved as HTML. I presented the results of my attempts to explain a complicated system simply in “The ABC’s of SuDocs.”

 Works Progress Administration: Federal Writer’s Project 

 Class:               Government Documents (Spring 1999)  

Assignment:      Discuss the history and workings of a government department

HTML Editor:      Word 

Technique:        I was interested in the part of the Depression era “Works Progress Administration” that put writers, artist, actors, and playwrights to work. In Florida the “Federal Writer’s Project” had collected folktales and life histories and brought them back to local offices to be typed and bound. Mother had been one of the secretaries in Jacksonville who took pencil notes and made them readable. It was a thrill to go over to special collection and hold a carbon copy of Mother’s labors and look on the Library of Congress’ American Life Histories page and see the same thing preserved. 

Again I used this page as a diverting visual for the class as I spoke and as a ‘teleprompter’ for my notes. I created it in Word, added visuals from the LC WebPages and from an online collection of Florida postcard in the Florida State Archives, and saved it as HTML.

University of Florida IFAS: Interlibrary Loan Reference

 Class                 Reference for Distance Users (Spring 1999)

Assignment:      Create a reference page for Distance users

HTML Editor:      Netscape Composer

Technique:        This was a joint project with Karen Brown and James Ruszczyk. Karen and I did the bulk of the research and Jim did the bulk of the typing. The Interlibrary Loan Request page was modified from one that was in existence. 

Page created by Jane Anne Carey (jacarey@ufl.edu) - 08-06-02

Last updated - 10-14-02

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