INFO 5090 - Practicum Blog

A surprising part of the collection was the large amount of music sheets for the piano. There was around 200 by later count, some dated between the 1960s to 1970s.   The second day of the internship started with instruction on appraisal and why it’s an important step for  any archival institute. I already had a surface level understanding of appraisal because of a past class I’ve  taken, Introduction to Archives. My basic understanding was that institutions only have so many resources  such as expertise, preservation tools, physical space, etc. to allocate to materials. So, it’s necessary for  institutions to remove some materials from donated items so the rest of the collection can be probably taken  care of. However, today’s lesson by one of the assistant supervisors Jess had some information that I hadn’t  considered before. For example, some institutions may not have the necessary expertise or resources to  pres...

The Phil Johnson collect ion as donated before I surveyed the material. There's a variety of material including books, DVD s, writing and artifacts.        This was the first day of my internship with the special collections department at the University of North Texas. I’m working alongside seven other students processing materials for the university archives. I was assigned to the Philip Johnson collection; a collection of personal items, paperwork, and writing done by gay activist Philip Johnson. Johnson advocated for gay rights, and contributed a huge amount of materials to UNT’s LGBT resource Center. He, unfortunately, passed away in 2019 but I’m really excited to work with the materials provided by his estate. Our supervisor for the internship, Morgan Gieringer, went over what we’d be doing for the next five weeks. In broad strokes, we’ll be surveying our collections, appraising the materials, making a processing plan, arranging the materials, determining what n...