Journal 6

09/23/13       10:00am-4:00pm      36 hours

M and I went over the records that I had been working on the past week. She was pleased with how descriptive I’ve been, and only made a few corrections. I was glad that I had not lost my touch with describing from working at the Municipal Archives.

The day moved slowly as I continued on box 1. I was getting the hang of PastPerfect and have been improving with reading old-fashioned handwriting. I was starting to see the end of the box, which was encouraging, but I felt like I was moving too slowly. After all, I wanted to work on the finding aid too before the semester was out. However, M seemed happy with my speed of progress. She was worried that I wouldn’t be busy for the semester.

I also suggested to M that I attempt to encode the finding aid in EAD (Encoded Archival Description). I had learned the basics of the markup before, and I had written a paper about it for a class. The archive didn’t have tools like Archivist ToolKit, but I could easily enough do the markup by hand. Currently, the finding aids are all in PDF format. However, EAD might make it easier for search engines and the like to find information.

Not quite done with Box 1 at the end of the day. Almost there.