The Carleton building I chose to recreate with Sketchup is the Faculty Club. It is a set three of residential houses located a block past Watson Hall on the east side of campus. Though the Faculty Club is unknown to most Carleton students, it is one of my favorite buildings on campus. Each of the three residential houses exhibit unique structures and designs that seem like a lot of fun to recreate digitally.
In order to obtain photographs of the Faculty Club, I dove into the digital collection of Carleton’s history. The book Carleton Remembered 1909-1986, provided exactly what I needed; with both information and photos of the construction of the Faculty Club. Pictured below is an image from Carleton Remembered, captured by Merrill Janchow in 1928, almost immediately after construction.
Figure 1: Faculty Club Courtyard
Carleton’s online archives also guided me to a helpful article at: http://www.northfieldhistorical.org/items/show/73. Like Carleton Remembered, this article allowed me to obtain more esoteric knowledge and photographs of the Faculty Club.
Once I had gathered all of the images that I could find, I began the long process of categorizing my photos into the metadata sections. These sections included description, creator, source, publisher, date, title, and more. With the directions from the Dublin Core Metadata Guidelines, this part of the task wasn’t all that difficult, just tedious.
This was my first time employing metadata techniques to conduct research. Though the process of gathering metadata felt long and unnecessary, I understood that the end result made research incredibly more convenient for others. I was in fact contributing to a free and open source movement. It’s fitting that the process of preserving metadata is quite time-consuming, as once the information is categorized, it can be preserved online and made conveniently accessible to others for as long as needed.
Wow! You did a lot of specific research with great results! I appreciated the conciseness of your post as well as the specificity with which you described your process. After reading your post, I had some ideas on other information I could gather for my own project. Best of luck with the faculty club! Looks like a great project.
I also find that building really beautiful. Great job researching pictures and logging their meta data!
I’d never been in Faculty Club til this year, but now some of my friends are living there and it’s been quite something to see their rooms (some with fireplaces or window seats, some with random extra doors, etc), the twisting hallways, and the Hogwarts-ish lounges. The article you linked to sheds some interesting light on this odd building, and I’m excited to see what else you find out about it!