Saturday, July 11, 2015

Day 11

Day 11
Rachel Brune Papers
Grabbed an artifact box for the 3 smallish artifact items. One of which is metal and thus wrapped in bubble wrap to further protect it. Talked about the thinking that goes into keeping artifacts. There's the information the artifact contains ie words on a plaque or a patch. Then there's the informational value of the item as a physical object itself, not just what it represents. With some items at times, these concerns may be played off each other as the physical space the object takes up may come into play, will a copy of the item work as well?

Went through and labelled the various folders.  As we went over these together, I was told to include the letters Rachel wrote to her family collated in with the other personal correspondence by the date as opposed to keeping them separate. Several letters had no year and no envelopes, so they got filed with the undated letters. As I labelled the folders, I realized there were several gaps, some by months others by almost a couple of years. A few I could chalk up to the fact that I had a lot of Christmas cards and letters with no years and could account for a few of the gaps. Others I think largely correspond to the times she was back in the States... less written correspondence as well as less likely to get filed with her military material. It appears as when done, the papers in folders will be in 3 boxes, plus the one textile box with the flag and patch and the artifact box containing the small artifacts.

Also broke the folders down into series and created a numbering system which will be used to make my notes and the finding aide. For multiple folders within a series such as the five that will go under Journalism and the six or so that comprise the Correspondence, the numbers will be along the lines of 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, etc.

Further weeded out the papers. Went through the physical copies of the newspapers that we had set aside for educational purposes. This time the purpose was to pull a small selection of those that were left that contained articles that might pertain specifically to women in the military.

We consulted with another archivist about how to handle the small bound notebooks of notes, especially as they contained loose papers and a bunch of post-it notes. It appears there will be more copying in my future. I will also be taught how to make some small protective covers for the books to fit into. One of the books contains a small group of papers so that will be put in a folder separate with a note referring to the book. So, I will need to label the books, chronologically if possible. This may be difficult as I can find month and days easily enough, but no years. These books are notes to herself regarding various things and interviews. As such, there are a lot of sentence fragments and non sequiturs. It does not make for easy reading or scanning.

I am reminded that in some ways this is more of an Art than a Science. I am also reminded of how in my old job I would look at a big project, think of several ways that I could tackle it, and then choose what I thought would be the most expedient way. It would turn out many times that about half-way through, I would realize that the path I chose was not quite the quickest or easiest way to do it. I say this because I find myself either repeating work or discarding material that I had already spent time working on. As I refine the filing system of the materials I have gone through, I realize I am going to have to go over them again when it comes to typing up my notes.

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