Ahhh, the halfway point of my twelve week journey into the world of interning!
The first batch of finding aids are coming along nicely, to a point I think they’ll be ready to be shuffled onto Mark next week (fingers crossed). It’s been an adventure stringing together each individual finding aid like beads on a string; some have beads scattered all over the place while others they’re at least all in a box just waiting for you. My favorites are the ones where you have to make the beads (oh look, another stretched analogy to go along with!)
And by making the beads I mean taking to the internet at large in order to help put together the big picture that ultimately a finding aid presents of any given collection. It’s nice to know all the who, what, when, where, and why, and how’s of a collection even if that means sourcing out to find all the supplemental information. Sometimes what you find isn’t even included in the collection — and sometimes you can’t find a place to include that random bit of information, either — but it’s still a fascinating process.
Take for instance the Daisie Dodson collection: it’s morbidly intriguing…in a good way. She was only fourteen when President Wilson died so, like any normal teenager would, she collected all the newspaper articles and clippings she could find about it. Okay, so maybe not that normal, but that’s completely okay because this collection — though small — offers so many different perspectives on the same exact event, the death of Woodrow Wilson, a man who somehow managed to steer an entire country through a very large, very new kind of war halfway around the world. Some of the articles, even if the author didn’t particularly care for Wilson’s politics, penned respect where respect was due and honestly they’re just something to flip through and read.
What especially caught my attention were the mentions of Wilson’s death masks and my immediate need to Google just that: “Woodrow Wilson death mask and where is it”.
While I’m still not entirely sure where Wilson’s mask itself is — Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, some random, travelling death mask curiosities exhibit — I definitely learned something new and did go Google more about it at work after leaving WWPL (my apologies to all the coworkers who I forced to look through online death mask galleries with me!)
The best part about the Daisie Dodson collection — matters of death aside — is that it isn’t alone in the content it offers in terms of offering archival researchers and visitors insights into the multi-faceted times of Wilson’s life both before, during, and after.
