I selected Musser as the building to sketch. On my quest to finding images through the archives, I stumbled upon a wall: I could not find many Musser images. In fact, one of the only images I found was one which only shows some windows of the building. I am not sure if I did my search incorrectly, but after an exhaustive search on the online Carleton College Archives, and even on Carleton College’s building site, not much was found. Regardless of my not so successful quest, I still was able to understand the ins-and-outs (okay, maybe I’m not an expert yet) of using archives, gathering data and metadata. Of course, this is only a glimpse to how the researching and recording process works, but even so, it is still really informative.
After an exhaustive search on Carleton College Archives, I downloaded the images I could find of my building. Then I had to gather all the metadata of the image itself, and input it onto an excel sheet.
The one image of Musser I could find.
This was my first time conducting research in such way. It is much more meticulously than simply just googling a picture, and then citing it. However, I think that is what is important, because having a detailed and accurate metadata of the image, that one can refer to will later facilitate whatever humanities project it is being undertaken. If later a person needs to refer back to the information, having the metadata in one place, with detailed information is less messy, because sometimes links can break, yet one can still have enough information of whatever piece of data one is looking stored in one place.
I found this post really funny, because I think Musser is a pretty ugly building. It makes sense to me that nobody would want to photograph it! I tried finding you some more photos here. However, as you said, the photos only show pictures of Musser students themselves, rather than the dorm. I guess Musser doesn’t really provide a very pretty background in which to take a floor photo!