Keeping Things Interesting (Internship Week 3)

This week for my internship, I continued to get acquainted with the wonderful world of metadata! I spent one workday on campus at UCF, inputting metadata into the computer. Then, I spent the next day working onsite at First Baptist Winter Park doing the same thing. The day I worked on campus, inputting metadata was relatively uneventful. Working onsite at the church, however, I got to work with some great people and discover some fun stories in the scrapbooks I was working on.

First, the people! When I was at the church, I got to work with Betty Sample, Shirley, and Rebecca. Shirley is a sweet lady who used to work at the Public History Center. She’s always got a smile, a good story, and a positive attitude. Then, there’s Rebecca! Rebecca is a UCF Lead Scholar who received an assistantship through the Lead Scholars program to work for Ms. Sample and this church archival project. Rebecca is a senior at UCF and is applying for graduate school in both public history and public health programs. Rebecca’s really sweet and great to work with. Thursdays are fun days as I get to work with this great group of ladies.

Then, there’s the scrapbooks! There were several things this week that were fun to read. First, as I was transcribing an article from a newspaper, I noticed there were articles and advertisements on the back of the article I was transcribing. When I flipped the article over, I found an article titled “Russian-U.S. Teams may vie at Winter Park.” As I read this article, I discovered that Winter Park was going to be hosting a Junior Olympics event for track and field athletes. I thoughts this was a fascinating article, given that this article was published during the middle of the Cold War, in 1979. Here’s a picture of the article:

In addition to the article about the Russian-U.S. teams, a second article caught my attention. Just a few days ago, a friend of mine’s uncle went missing. So, when I saw an article titled “Reward for Information,” it caught my attention. Reading the article, I learned that two young men from First Baptist Winter Park were missing. The article then encouraged church members to donate to a reward fund to help in the search for the missing youth. The article also stipulated that if the boys were not found alive, the reward money would be used as a memorial fund. Here's a picture of the advertisement in the scrapbook:

Knowing that this article was over 30 years old, I figured that I could search the internet to see if the boys had been found. Sure enough, I found a digitized copy of the Daytona Tribune, which explained that both boys were found alive and well in California. In fact, the article explained that the boys had staged their whole disappearance, hoping that their stunt would “draw everyone closer to Christ.” How crazy is that?! Here’s a picture of the digitized article:

  

             

         Discovering all of this was pretty cool. Not only did I not expect to find an advertisement for missing persons in the church scrapbooks, but I certainly didn’t expect to find that the boys had been found, let alone discover that the boys had staged the entire stunt. Reading this story, and others like it, keeps metadata interesting.