Picking up from my last post, I will focus on the design and curatorial decisions for my project. While looking through the Baker scans, I started to sketch out my site’s design and what it will include. I chose WordPress through the Academic Commons since I am familiar with it and I want to include more text than images. My minimum requirements are: 

• 4 of Baker’s Bibliographies (digital)
• Selected children’s books (digital)
• Selections from Baker’s Archive (paper to digital)
• History of children’s books leading up to Baker’s Bibliographies
• Biography of Baker
• Resources for students and librarians (links to websites and current bibliographies)

Since the bibliographies are the focus, I had to figure out how to best display them. I wanted the bibliographies to look like a book, so I used 3D Flipbook (WordPress plugin) and created a book from the PDFs I downloaded from NYPL. I chose this because some of Baker’s bibliographies are not available digitally through NYPL. I can now download from other resources (like DPLA) and they will all look the same. Underneath the bibliography is text that highlights what was happening in the publishing world and the U.S. at that time, along with pieces from Baker’s collection that connect to the bibliography and her editing process. I thought about using Flipbook for the children’s books, but I knew that would create unneeded work for myself. There are also a lot of great collections that have the books along with additional resources that would be beneficial to my users. Those repositories deserve to have their work viewed. Selected books from the bibliographies are hyperlinked in the text, along with why they are important. I only have 2 bibliographies on the site right now, but have the children’s books and text ready to paste. 

Deciding what children’s books to include was difficult, since the majority of early picks were from White creators. It makes sense, since Black creators were so few and often not picked up by major publishing houses. I made a decision early on to include as many Black creators as possible in my project, especially since it was a Black woman who created the bibliographies. Altman’s Black Women in the Archive and the editing choices made for the Black Women’s Suffrage collection reinforced my decision. “To combat this disparity in the Black Women’s Suffrage collection we strove to include as many materials about Black women as possible, and limit the number of materials about White people and men.  We did not want to exclude White and male voices from the collection, because they provide important context for Black women’s experiences”  The White creators I did include wrote inclusive books and often collaborated with Black creators. 

I had a brief biography of Baker ready to upload, so it was time to work on the history of children’s books leading up to the bibliographies. Books in the early 1900s promoted harmful portrayals of Black people, and it took decades for these books to be removed from circulation or edited (Little Black Sambo). I wanted to include images of books in my text, but I was concerned about highlighting harmful stereotypes on the site. Duncan and Lisa pointed this out as well in our meetings, so I struggled with what to do. I decided to follow Curator Shanee Yvette Murain’s plan (Altman) of including racist materials because they provide important historical context, but I limited it to two images. I provide links to sources that provide more information for those interested, but I will not go into more detail on the site. 

My final and most daunting task is uploading items from Baker’s collection. I am grateful to USC for sending me the scans, but those I am interested in using are blurry or too light/dark to make out. I also believe they have a copy of the first bibliography (1938) which is not available at NYPL and the one I wanted to have on the site. I would love to make a trip to the archive so I can see everything in person. I debated whether to include the images I found in my site, but decided including them would illustrate the importance of digitizing the collection and this project overall. A friend recommended an open source version of Adobe Photoshop, but I don’t think I will have enough time to figure it out and edit the images. I have spoken with USC about digitizing, and explained my project a bit more to them. They are encouraging, which I hope will lead to a successful collaboration. Only two weeks left, and so much to do!

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