Priority: Staying Sane

I almost didn’t make it this week but I couldn’t already fall off the resolutions bandwagon!

Well the semester is in its first week and things are officially gearing up.  I definitely didn’t end up with a super easy last semester like I originally planned a when I first started grad school, but I would definitely say this is all the good kind of busy.  I told the professor I do research for that I’m taking Database Management this semester and his response was “Aww, Mt. Everest!”  I thought that kind of summed things up well.

What I’d really like to talk about tonight though is the start of my volunteering at the Erie Canal Museum.  I’ve volunteered at quite a few institutions in my time since discovering this field and I’ve got to say that this is already my favorite.  I have not one criticism of them.  They really care about their collection, they really care about representing the true history of Syracuse, and everyone really seems to be truly interested in what they’re doing.  Plus the fact that my project is all about manuscripts, primarily from the the 18 and early 19 hundreds, certainly isn’t hurting!  I can’t remember whether or not I’ve expressed my love of manuscripts before, but let me do it (possibly again) now.  I LOVE manuscript collections.  Rare books have their magic, artifacts can be truly fascinating, but nothing pulls me back to a time in history like a handwritten letter or diary by a real person going through the true everyday life of that time.  Mixed with the posters, ads, pamphlets, papers, records, what have you that also pop up in manuscript collections, what better way to understand the truth of history?

My job at the museum is to pick up where someone else left off (actually a friend of mine who doesn’t have the time anymore but knew it would be right up my alley) taking the existing manuscripts collection and cataloging/updating the existing catalog records in the museums database using PastPerfect.  Along with my cataloging, I’m also keeping notes about condition and focusing on finding provenance.  If time permits, I may also be doing some rehousing for the materials since their existing housing is older than most of the museum staff.  The existing records in the database are really a prime example of the problems facing many cultural heritage institutions today.  As with many repositories, keeping a standard quality method of cataloging was not always a priority in the past in the light of limited resources.  Although sometimes this is a result of people who didn’t care enough, more often it is the result of different times and different priorities, or even just different people with different ideas.  I in no way criticize this second possibility, it’s just an unfortunately confusing reality sometimes and a strong argument for keeping a standard policy and for keeping communication a priority.

During a semester of stressful classes and even more stressful job applications, having a volunteering opportunity for something I really believe I will have a great time with is going to be a huge relief.  I just might stay sane.

Days as a Manuscripts Intern

Ever since I worked in the Digital Curation department in UVA’s Small Special Collections Library, I have loved working with manuscripts, especially letters and diaries.  I like to say I’m a naturally nosey person so I was made for this job haha.  Well anyway, this summer I got the opportunity to work in the manuscripts department of the special collections library here at SU and I’ve been having a lot of fun.  I’ve been tasked to process a manuscript collection from an alum of SU who’s been sending stuff since the 60′s.  He was a creative arts director who worked in Boston, Pittsburgh, and LA at different points in his life.  He was an active letter writer and kept what appears to be almost all of his correspondence with family, friends, and lovers.  The love letters have been the most intriguing to me.  The man got around.  At this point I’ve counted 28 different women, several of whom overlap, and I’ve only gotten through a fraction of the correspondence.  Juicy stuff.  Plus I get to play detective sometimes and figure out who this person is that signed with just their initials or just signed “me” by comparing handwriting and nicknames and content and whatever else I can find

But I’ve been doing more than reading letters.  I’ve learned a great deal about what goes into preparing a collection for researchers.  First we had to retrieve the entire collection from storage (and trust me, it’s a large collection), then we went through every box and did a preliminary assessment of the contents so that we could try to figure out a method of sorting.  That took several weeks in an of itself.  Now we are slowly using that assessment to try to determine basic categories (clearly I’m on personal correspondence at the moment), but with the constant reminder that that may all change as we continue.  The bottom line is you really just don’t know what you’re going to find that might throw a wrench in your whole system.  But I love it.  I’m an overly organized person (my favorite app is a to do list organizer that syncs my computer and my phone) and turning a pile of complete chaos into neat little piles of categories that I can use to label folders and put into a box in alphabetical order just plain makes me happy.

Some good lessons I’ve gotten on the job so far:

1. Never think you’ll look at something once.  No matter what you’re going to have to go through every piece multiple times
2. The world is small.  You never know what you’ll find that relates to something else or that even relates to you
3. Know when to be detailed and when not to be or you’ll waste a lot of time on things you have to redo anyway
4. Take good notes.  You can’t remember everything and you don’t know what you might miss if you aren’t careful

I doubt I actually have enough time left in my semester to finish the whole collection, but I’ll be really sad if I don’t get to do the finding aid for this (although I did get to do one for another collection while waiting for some boxes to get out of storage which was great for learning EAD).

Anatomy of a Librarian

Think you know what defines a librarian?  Really interesting dissection of the statistics of real librarians today.

http://master-degree-online.com/infographic-anatomy-of-a-librarian/

Librarians in Fashion