Journal 7

09/24/13       10:00am-4:00pm      42 hours

Today was a fun day.

First thing I looked at were some letters by Havelock Ellis, the sex researcher. Sadly, they were not that interesting. But it was cool that we have something by him.

Second, I found a handwritten notebook kind of document in neat handwriting. The folder gave the creator as L.N. Fowler. I was supposedly holding a character description derived from phrenology done by Fowler.

I couldn’t help but tell M about this. She gleefully looked at the book but went, “How do you know that Fowler did this?”

“Ah, I’m not quite sure on that front then,” I said, realizing the problem. “The folder it was originally kept in said it was done by Fowler, but it might have been a student of his or something.”

“Well, I think we have a Fowler text annotated by him…”

M went to find it so we could compare the two handwritings. Meanwhile, I tried Googling Fowler’s handwriting, with no success. She came back with the book, but while it was a Fowler text from his phrenology course, it was not written in by Fowler, but by a student. We decided to trust the folder information for now. But it’s still really cool.

Also managed to finally finish box 1 and move into box 2. I’m up to processing about 25 items a day. I’m pleased. 

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.

Journal 5

09/17/13       10:00am-4:00pm      30 hours

More copies to be made awaited me when I entered the archive this morning. After processing some more of box 1, I went to copy for an hour.

Our collective frustration was growing with the researcher. He had added even more materials to be copied, and in some cases, it included entire books. I wasn’t sure if we were breaching copyright at this point, but he needed it so badly apparently. So off I went.

I groaned as I took out a document from the late 1940s. The paper was acidic and horribly brittle. It was fastened with a metal fastener at the top. Consequently, if I wanted to read the next page, I would have to flip the page over. This presented even worse of a problem when I tried to flip to the next page to copy. The document was so thick that the paper folder over, and part of the text would be obscured. And I could not try to copy that section without doing worse damage to the document than I was already doing just by copying by it.

I did not have the top of the office copier down, but to get the text clear near the gutters, I would have to press down. I did slightly, hearing the phantom screams of my preservation professor in my head. No doubt she would track me down and cause my messy death if she knew I was doing this. As I copied, I saw shreds of paper covering the copier and I wanted to weep. Finally the document was done, and so was my allotted time for copying. I then met M and explained that the document was not going to be complete, and to warn the researcher. Then finally, back to my processing area to work on box 1. I was pleased at least to note that I was getting through materials faster in processing.

Journal 4

09/16/13       10:00am-4:00pm      24 hours

When I arrived at the archive this morning, we had a researcher in. I remembered M mentioning something about having to track down materials for him. Then I saw the piles of folders sitting on the table by him.

“Christy, would you be willing to do some photocopying? There’s a lot that needs to be done, and it would help if you did some for like a half hour or so.”

“Sure,” I responded. I then set down my things and went to go photocopy.

Here’s the thing though. The researcher had literally asked for hundreds and hundreds of pages for us to copy. It seemed like he was trying to take home all of the papers he had read through for researching purposes. The archive has 1.5 staff members: M, and me. I knew what we were doing for the rest of the week.

I realized there was another problem as a photocopied. A lot of the paper was onionskin copies from typewriters. The type was blurry as a result. He was going to have a hard time reading this. When I told M, she pointed out that this was the best we could do. So I copied three folders, finishing about 150 pages in that time. Needing a break from the fumes, I then went back to processing box 1. I went back in after lunch to copy more. I really hope that he’s happy with the copies. If he asks for redone copies after receiving things, M and I might cry. 

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. 

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.

Journal 1

09/03/13       10:00am-4:00pm      6 hours

I had a feeling that I was going to have fun at this internship when I picked up a random folder today and a photograph of Johann Spurzheim’s skull fell out. While I was initially confused as to why they would keep a photograph of Johann Spurzheim’s skull in the archive, I learned that Spurzheim was the pre-eminent phrenologist of his day. Apparently, the archive likes the phrenologists as much as the psychiatrists and the psychoanalysts.

The first hour of my internship today was attempting to get my hospital ID and receiving the quick tour of the floor and parts of the hospital I may have to go to.  Then my supervisor showed me the archives and special collections area, complete with a small processing room. My job that day was to go through the boxes in the miscellaneous collection that I would be processing and get a feel for the materials, rehousing and putting things in correct preservation envelopes if necessary. That’s when I found the photograph of Spurzheim’s skull.  In the process I realized that the materials were randomly organized alphabetically; they were not explained in the inventory list other than “Miscellaneous A-K” in some cases. I started trying to track down accession years so we could assign item numbers. I also waited to hear from my supervisor when PastPerfect would be properly set up for me to start entering things into it. By the end of the day, I had gone through three of the five boxes.