Second Day - May 21, 2024

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 

preserve materials that may be damaged, very old, or both. On the other hand, some materials may not be 

suitable for sharing, such as medical and personal information. 

After the presentation on appraisal, we spent the rest of the day surveying our collections. The Philip 

Johnson collection is contained in three boxes. I managed to look through most of the first two boxes. The 

first one contained a lot of personal items like books, photos and some miscellaneous items. I was able to

 gather some small bits of information about Philip Johnson. I had already done some research on him 

before surveying but it was interesting to gather information from the collection. The second box contained 

a large collection of piano music. As well as being an activist, Johnson also played piano, and was a 

professional dancer for several years. I think he may have also taught piano but I can't find direct 

confirmation yet, so it’s only a guess. There was an autobiographical scrapbook put together by Johnson. 

I wasn’t able to look through the entire book but what I’ve read already, it’s a very interesting telling of 

Johnson’s personal and family history.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First Day: May 20, 2024

Image
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...
Read more

Day Three - May 22, 2024

Image
       Today, we had a lecture on making a processing plan for the first hour of the morning. It was very informative and our supervisors, Sam and Meagan, made sure to put a template for a processing plan and some example plans in the  team's account. I Spent most of the day working on surveying. I looked through the rest of Phil’s scrapbook. I learned  some interesting stuff about his life, career and activism. I was considering it before but now I’m definitely sure it  should be the main part of the collection. The book had a lot of interesting photos and some really interesting writing  about his early life. I kind of wish he had written more about his life. I think he did contribute to a few different  newspapers so maybe more of his personal stories are written down in the world.  I think I’m getting a better idea of the function of this collection now. With the book, the paperwork on his  military career, the papers kept...
Read more

Day Thirteen - June 6, 2024

Image
  Today the morning was taken up entirely by an introductory presentation to ArchivesSpace.  The website used by UNT to manage the metadata and online database for their archival collections. We  won’t be able to actually input anything into ArchivesSpace yet because the person in charge of that is on  vacation until next week.  The actual website looked a bit like some of the programs I’ve used while freelancing. I’ve done a bit of  data-entry and research jobs for a local newspaper, but of course the focus of the two sites requires some  different features. I appreciated how in depth the presenter went. Especially where we could access tutorials  on how to use the site's different features, even if the videos were in their words “Too long and boring”.  I tend to be more of a visual learner, so having some extra instructions should be helpful in the future. For the second presentation on resource record, eMott went throug...
Read more