Journal 2

09/09/13       10:00am-4:00pm      12 hours

First lesson of the day: arrive at the hospital at least a half hour in advance. Everyone wants the same two elevators and sometimes the wait is 15 minutes. I barely made it to the archive on time because of this.

Second lesson of the day: remember to hit the save button on your Word documents so you don’t lose the notes you kept while looking through things.

I spent the day rehousing and looking through the materials in boxes four and five. My frustration at the previous attempt to work with the materials grew as I realized that in several cases, they did not actually title the materials, but just threw a “miscellaneous” title on the folder. A miscellaneous title in a miscellaneous box? That would really help out a researcher.  When I told a friend also in the GSLIS program later that day about this, his response was “Miscellaneous means things we don’t feel like working on, right? Let’s get lunch and curb stomp baby kittens.” However, I realized why they probably didn’t fully name things in the collection: the handwriting was difficult to read in many cases. Sometimes I had to bring in the materials to my supervisor, who used to work at the New York Historical Society and therefore was used to weird penmanship from the 1800s. The final thing I considered was how to standardize the folders. The archive had changed hands several times, and was run by special collections librarian. While my supervisor definitely knows what she is doing, it’s clear that she has not worked from a strictly archival area. Therefore little things like box and folder number were missing from the folders, things that were beaten into me in the previous archives I’ve worked at. However, I kept this in notes, and this time I remembered to save them.