Journal 3

09/10/13       10:00am-4:00pm      18 hours

The PastPerfect has been installed, and the previous processing information was converted from Excel to it! Good timing, as I had finished looking through the five boxes, saved for the oversized materials. However, that could be looked at later. My supervisor, M, came to my area and we began looking at what we wanted to fill out in the software. Both of us have worked with PastPerfect before, and she had been asking me my thoughts on what should be filled in. We decided that we would describe at item level in most cases, a departure from the previous archives I’ve worked in, which tended to stop at folder level. However, the folders often contained one item, and the miscellaneous collection did not have any real thread that it followed (no original order, no single donor, etc). We would assign item numbers starting with year added to the collection, folder number, and then individual item number if there was more than one item in the folder, e.g. 1955.335.01. And we would describe creator, scope and content, and extent of the item. We then had a small discussion about numbering box and folder on the folders. We finally agreed that we would use the item number as the folder number, rather than numbering the folders in each box, so there would be flexibility.  The final thing we agreed on was the template for each folder layout (collection name, title, year, box and item number, etc). I then put it in a Word document so we would have it later. I worked on this for the rest of the day, with her checking records at intervals. Apparently I’m not bad at description.