Hello there! I hope everyone had a good week. This past week was my third week as a SCUA Intern, and it was a great week! This week started with me coming in and almost fully rehousing the collection! On Tuesday, I finished rehousing the first series, which was all the paper documents of the collection, and putting them into their new filebox home. Rehousing is when you take the materials that haven’t been processed and are still in their original containers, or the containers they were given to you in, and put them into acid-free boxes and folders. When doing this, you also need to add the collection title, series name, subseries name, and title of the materials inside the folder/box on the container. While it’s not hard, it does take a little bit of time to do.
On Wednesday, the federal work study girl, who just started, and I got a tour together. I did get a tour in my first week, but I didn’t get to see the ARC or the gallery on the fourth floor during it. So, we got a tour together! We started in the SCUA offices on the fifth floor, looking at the stacks up there and what they contain. We got to see some of the art collection and also how they protect it in case of water leaks or other potential hazards. We then went to the fourth floor and looked at the gallery. The annual student book arts competition was still set up, and they all looked amazing! I really liked the fruit books, especially the little orange that could be unfolded to read it. It was so cute! After that, we visited the ARC on the first floor. The ARC, or the Automated Retrieval Center, is a big machine that’s about three stories tall that holds most of the library books, along with a lot of the SCUA’s completed collections.
After the tour, we went back down to the first floor, where the collection room that I work in is, and I started working on the Excel-to-ead worksheet. The Excel-to-ead is an Excel spreadsheet that you input the collection information into, and it makes it really easy to transfer over to ArchivesSpace. ArchivesSpace is the program that SCUA uses to make finding aids available for people researching the collections. Overall, it was a pretty confusing process at first. Thankfully, Chloe, one of the archivists who works at SCUA, was there to help and explain it to me. I would’ve been so lost trying to do it on my own.
On Thursday, my supervisor, Arielle, and I talked about the readings for this week. They were about archival silences and the appraisal process, which are both important to understand. I also mostly finished the Excel-to-ead spreadsheet, and started adding file numbers to folders in my collection. Overall, this was a busy week!
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog post!