February 20-February 22

This entire week was dedicated to the compiling and editing of metadata. On Monday I received the good news that Mr. Cravero had finished taking notes on my metadata and had emailed those to me. I thanked him and immediately reviewed his notes and applied the necessary changed to my metadata. This proved to be a very time consuming process. The first thing that needed changing was rearranging my name so that the last name was first and the first name was last. This was easy to change but because I had done this for all my metadata entries it took a good amount of time to go through every entry and make the change. Also, I learned that when it comes to coverage it is required that locations mentioned by the documents also need to mentioned. This meant that I had to review all the documents again and check them for mentions of locations that were not the First Unitarian Church of Orlando. Even now I am still not finished with this task. Another thing that needed to be edited was the medium of the documents. Also, I forgot to put that in for several entries so along with editing already existing mediums I had to input new ones and this required, of course, the reviewing of prior documents. By the end of the day I edited out the most glaring problems and compiled some metadata about the first few 1959 sermons. Still, there are still some fixes I need to make and more sermons to be scanned.

On Wednesday I took a break from editing the metadata to focus on compiling the metadata on the remaining 1959 sermons. Being more used to metadata I worked faster than usual but was still unable to finish examining all the sermons. I found Reverend Fuller's sermons to be rather intellectual and complicated, much more so than an average Christian sermon. Reading his words I found Reverend Fuller to be a very knowledgeable and educated man. In his sermons he mentioned numerous other sources of information and even mentioned the beliefs of other religions, especially Judaism. His educations is best made apparent in is sermon about how Unitarians should read the Bible. In his sermon he discussed how it is a collection of different books written over a period of hundreds of years. He also discussed how each book was written with by a different author with his own agenda, so every book must not be taken literally and that the context of each book had to be understood before reading. He recommended that his congregation read an edition of the Bible known as the "Dartmouth Bible" because it provided useful notes that could help any reader understand the historical context of each book. He recommended that the Bible be read not as a religious document, but as piece of literature equal to the Dialogues of Plato or the plays of Shakespeare. I found this all very interesting, not because these ideas were new to me but because this was the first time I had heard of a member of the clergy expressing this sentiment. Even though I left without finishing all the metadata for the 1959 documents I was satisfied with the progress I made.