My internship at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library has started out… comfortably. It was a rainy day that felt cold, and I got to spend it inside a historic house cataloging a box of records and listening to the wind moan and the rain lash the windows.
My supervisor, Dr. Mark Peterson, greeted me warmly, showed me my box of records (Woodrow Wilson and Segregation Box 1), and told me to type out all the folder names in the box in Microsoft Word. I was glad he was letting me work independently. I have never cataloged anything before, but by giving me the freedom to figure things out myself, he communicated that there were many right ways to complete the job. There was a partially finished spreadsheet of the folder names, so I copied the column names (ID#, Date, Correspondent, Subject, etc.) and started filling out data.
My Collections Management course prepared me to catalog the folders. For example, I knew that letters were part of the accession number and written as one word (1234a-b, not 1234 a-b). I also knew that I needed to be extremely precise when entering data, and I checked each set at least once before moving on to the next folder. I was mainly working with scans of documents since it was a chronologically organized artificial collection, so I didn’t have to worry about document handling.
Cataloging was relaxing in one way and difficult in another. It was satisfying to input the data in neat rows and watch the stack of cataloged folders grow, but I was also seeing civil rights go downhill, headline by headline. First, there were memos suggesting segregation in Federal Bureaus; then there were letters describing violations of segregation, petitions protesting segregation, petitions being ignored, justifications for segregation, and finally threats of violence. I’ll read the papers later, but stage one is familiarizing myself with my box’s contents by cataloging the folders (I’m 1/4 of the way done). I’m excited to see what stories of courage and hatred, bystanders and advocates, everyday people and powerful leaders my box holds.
