Hello, all! Women’s Military History Week ended a few weeks ago and I thought a blog post detailing the process of preparing for that week might be appreciated.
In the Spring of 2020 my supervisor and I began toying with the idea of publicly celebrating the WAVES program. A bill is circulating in the Oklahoma legislature that would make June 12than official holiday celebrating women in the military. Though the bill has not passed yet, we still wanted to honor the WAVES, provide parents with activities for their children, and showcase the work of the library’s interns.
First, I compiled a list of all OSU’s resources about the WAVES with links to their online location. This included OSU’s primary sources such as the main collection, yearbooks, and photograph collection. The list also included all the work done by OSU’s interns, such as my data visualizations and this blog, as well as other intern’s Story Maps and podcasts. Later in the process, these items were listed on the main WAVES collections landing page. This allowed visitors to see all the project’s offerings in a consolidated manner.
To publicize what we began to call WAVES Week, I reached out to the Library’s communications team. In working with communications, I learned how to fill out rather in depth social media forms, write snappy social media posts, and use hashtags. The communications team also had several graphic design interns who helped create children’s activities and turn pictures from OSU’s collection into coloring sheets.
I wanted to draw students and young children into this project and in doing so, I created several activity and craft sheets. The craft sheets were inspired by various aspects of the WAVES program. For instance, many WAVES used typewriters in their everyday jobs. One craft sheet had the students create a typewriter from a shoebox so they could pretend to type, just like the WAVES!
I also attempted to create student activity sheets for older children. These activity sheets focused on the data aspects of the WAVES project, specifically what I worked on during the Fall of 2019. The activity sheets attempted to introduce students to data and how graphs are created, as well as give them a fun activity to help the lesson sink in. Unfortunately, the activity sheets proved difficult to write to our specific needs and we decided to postpone using them until next year.
Finally, I created several blog posts to supplement the information on the WAVES collections page. You can view these, of course, on my blog.
Overall, WAVES week was a success and I enjoyed getting to work on these projects! To view the collection and my work, click here.