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Summer Review
It has been a long and great summer! I fell a bit behind on my updates so here's a quick recap.
The rest of my internship at the Newcomb Archives was fantastic. I learned a great deal on how to process a large collection in a short amount of time. I made inventories and recommendations for actions to take on some of the flooded materials and wrote a proposal for the archives to beginning collecting documents from grassroots women’s organizations formed to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I also sat in many meetings with the archivist as she was planning a variety of projects for the archives. It was very helpful to see and experience all of the tasks an archivist needs to accomplish when they are the only one on staff. In addition, I was able to get some sightseeing in and even feed marshmallows to alligators!
Summer job number two was at the Special Collections Library at UM. I worked as a project archivist for the Lincoln Highway Association Archive (1912-1940ish.) The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental highway in the country running from NYC to San Francisco. The LHA worked to promote and build the road. The founders believed in establishing the shortest route, but one that took drivers through picturesque areas and main streets throughout the country. This collection is one of the most requested from the Transportation Collection. It was processed in some form years ago, but very non user friendly and difficult for the reference archivist to locate materials quickly. My task was to re-process the collection to make access intuitive and easy. Many of the materials were very mundane such as meeting minutes, finances, press bulletins, and business correspondence. (Although, some were fun- such as the many maps of the routes) However, figuring out what the intellectual order would be the most efficient and logical was tons of fun. Sort of like puzzle pieces. I also completed a detailed finding aid (soon to be available online) and re-housed the materials to meet better preservation standards. You can check out over 3,000 digitized images from the LHA available at the Lincoln Highway Digital Image Collection.
The rest of my summer included some trips back to the East and West Coasts to visit family and friends. The summer was a nice mix of work and really the last chance to relax for quite a while. Stay tuned for the beginning of semester update!
Posted by cassch at September 19, 2007 01:17 PM
