Day Eight - May 30, 2024


 

I Spent the day processing the collection. There were no lectures today, so everyone was working under supervision 

by eMott in the morning then Meagen in the afternoon. I finished processing the music collection into two medium 

sized boxes, there were too many to fit into one medium but not enough to fill one large box. I had to go back and 

re-label some of the files I had written before, because I hadn’t written the folder # correctly. I already had a feeling 

I hadn’t done something right because for some reason yesterday the sample folder wasn’t on display. I guess 

someone had misplaced it. Once I finished the music collection, I moved onto the next series. I put all the photos 

from series 4: personal items into plastic protectors, including some that had been kept in frames. I was surprised to 

find three portrait photos of some young kids in the back of a portrait of Johnson when he was young. I don’t know 

how they got there or even if they were supposed to be donated but I asked the supervisor about it and we reasoned 

the kids were probably his nephews. Johnson had two sisters who I believe each went on to have their own children. 

She said it should be fine to keep since they are relevant to the collection. 

During this day I also finally sorted through some of the medical information we had been given. There was a decent

 stack and they hadn’t really come to us in a certain order. I separated the stack into groups, the pieces that actually 

went together and then by year. It was a little hard to figure out at first but most of them had the year they were 

printed in the corner. From there I figured out there was a surprising amount of copied material. There were three 

copies of Johnson’s discharge forms, including the original. Two copies of the same form filled out at different times 

and a big stack of blank forms, that looked like the kind anyone could get from the VA website. I talked with my 

supervisor again and she said to keep the copies but I could probably take out the blank forms. 

That’s basically everything I did for the day. I kinda avoided starting on the scrapbook because it’s at least over a 

hundred pages and the full page archival protective sheets don’t come with holes for a ringed binder. I’ll have to talk 

with the supervisors about that.

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