Week three ended in a success for team WWPL interns: Ashley and I finished processing the photo collection!
After presenting our various findings from week two to Mark we came up with the plan to just start fresh and leave the collection some padding in the form of numbering the remainder of it from 2800. When we hit our snag we were just past 2700 when we realized there were some duplicates (and triplicates) of some numbers, each folder with a different item.
From that point it was just a matter of finding out which item was already scanned in and leaving it as that number rather than going through the explorer file on the computer trying to renumber everything. What duplicates we had we just scanned in if they weren’t already or marked as a duplicate to then manually renumber from 2800.
It made the most sense to do it like this rather than going back through the entire collection trying to start from zero; some folders were missing in the earlier numbers we had done during week one meaning they could be misnumbered or misplaced or even part of the institutional photo collection. Speaking of which…Ashley will continue the good work of processing those while I move on to…drum roll, please…finding aids!
And archivist’s bread and butter, or so I’ve read and heard. At this point in time I’ve seen them, read them, used them, but have yet to actually experience creating one. I guess you could say they’re the Sasquatch of my archival studies concentration; the clues and sightings are all there, but the actual thing remains cleverly elusive.
I feel quasi-confident going into this week since I just finished my spring semester coming out of a purely metadata based course, but EAD (Encoded Archival Description) was just something we touched on; a brief wave to as we drove past. I’m not too worried since I know Mark will be there for my more than likely numerous questions (apologies in advance!) and I’ve got a bunch of online resources bookmarked I’d like to get printed at some point, so I don’t foresee this going too disastrously.
This week Mark also had Ashley and I slip downstairs for the June “Coffee with the Curator” program which featured the stories of Oscar Dabney and Margarent Cline from the museum’s Soldiers’ Stories: World War I Through American Eyes exhibit. Both were Staunton locals who went to France to serve in the war only to return home and get married; it was a good story, one fortunately with a happy ending, and it was nice to see how the museum utilized local history. We met with the museum curator afterwards to introduce ourselves and ask some questions mostly about how he handled preservation and if he ever pulled from the archives upstairs.
The program’s actually really neat and happens once a month (July will be about Woodrow Wilson and golf) so hopefully we can make the next two before our gigs as interns are up and we have to peace out at the end of the summer.
Bring on week four; I’ll let you know how the hunt for Sasquatch goes!
