First Day: May 20, 2024

The Phil Johnson collection as donated before I surveyed the material. There's a variety of material including books, DVDs, 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 needs to be preserved, adding descriptions, and at the end there will be a final review by a supervisor. After a quick overview of what we would be doing during the practicum, we were given a tour of the different areas of the archives department. Our guide Meagan was very descriptive about each place we visited. We saw the main area of the archives department which included the main desk, the department’s collection of tiny books, and their new zine library. I actually really enjoy reading zines, so browsing the mini-library was very fun. 

When the tour was over we went to lunch. The supervisors treated us to a nice meal in the university union. We all got to sit and talk for the hour break. Afterwards, we went back to our main work room. The process of surveying a collection was explained to us. In surveying, we basically have to go over all the material that had been provided in the donation. The main purpose is to determine what exactly the materials are, what purpose the collection might have and what issues the archive might have to resolve. These issues can include preservation challenges, privacy concerns, etc. After the survey introduction and going over the university’s organization app, Trello, we had a little extra time left before 3 pm. We spent about half an hour doing a surface level survey of our collections, without taking out materials from their boxes.