Day 15

Day 15
Rachel Brune cont.
Today I worked on finishing writing up the report that will be used to create the finding aide and then going over the work with my supervisor, Beth Ann Koelsch. Some of the corrections are ones that simply did not occur to me such as I listed some of the materials in folders in a list format. It looks nice on the page and is easy to read. However, the program this will be imported into does not use that format. It seemed such a logical and natural way to do it, that it did not occur to me to do so otherwise.

Other corrections were more along the lines of style. I had already encountered that dates were generally written in European order: day/month/year. It is an odd one and easy to remember. Harder to remember is to not abbreviate state names but spell them out. One of the hardest parts of going back to school was re-acquainting myself with the more formal style of academic writing. I had almost consciously purged myself of that style, trying to incorporate a more natural, almost conversational style and paying more attention to rhythm and flow. Spelling out state names is even more formal than normal academic style of writing. In my head it makes sense. I am constantly running into abbreviations on this project that are not defined. Plus, I am also old enough to remember when the abbreviation for Alabama was Ala. So, it makes sense to bypass that potential confusion. However, it is completely unnatural way to write.

There is also styles such as when to capitalize Military Police. Plus, to make sure the first time that it pops up in the guide, it is written out as "Military Police (MP)".

Other corrections were more of just general style and preference. Some were stylistic changes I would have made on my own going back in a day or two reviewing what I had written: correcting some too casual writing such as photos for photographs and alternating the use of her name with the pronoun "she" which flows better.

Westray Battle Broyce Papers
As there was not enough time to actually get into training on Archon, the program used to generate the online finding aides, I started processing one of the smaller collections on my cart. This collection is already divided up into four folders: photographs, correspondence, clippings, and miscellaneous and not really a lot of material in any of the folders. Its size would be deceptive though.

I glanced through the photographs, they did not have any dates and only one had actual information written on the back. Placing these by dates and identifying the people would have to come by other means.

I moved to correspondence. It turns out that Westray Battle attended Woman's College (now University of North Carolina Greensboro) from 1918 to 1919. Many of the letters to her concerning her coming to visit and giving a speech on the role of women and the WAC in the army. The last one that I read first identified one of the first photos.

It was processing the clippings that a fuller picture of the woman emerged. She was from the town I grew up in, Rocky Mount, NC. She worked on General Eisenhower's staff and achieved several firsts. She would be the second director of the WAC. She had a daughter by the same name, the first time I can recall seeing the suffix Jr. being applied to a woman's name. Thankfully, someone had written on the clippings, the dates and, in some cases, the papers they were from. Also included were a couple of clippings from issues of Alumnae News, a magazine covering the alumnae of Woman's College. Some of the other photographs were able to be identified as they were reproduced in some of the clippings. I managed to divide the clippings into chronological order and then make copies of them on acid free paper, grouping the ones from the same year together.

Day 14

Day 14
Rachel Brune Papers Cont.
Thanks to the 4th of July I lost a day of working. I am also past the halfway point of the Practicum. Looking into the time remaining and the hours missed, I realized that we had not taken into account the holiday and I needed to make up the lost day and make some changes in order to reach the goal of 120 hours by the end of the month. Somewhere the schedule had been miscalculated. While my schedule was arranged in order to work 20 days in two and a half months, it was also set up for 5 hour shifts. However, to reach 120 hours, the shifts should have been 6 hours from the beginning or arranged so that I would work 24 days. Such is life.

One would think I would be finished with Rachel Brune by now. I started putting the finishing touches on the collection. I labelled the folders by the series name and numbered them according to the series as some like "Correspondence" spanned several folders. The books I made covers for were labelled as if folders.

I then started typing up what I will call the "collection report". It is basically what will be the finding aide for the collection when placed online. It covers basic administrative information such as what the collection is, how it was obtained, who did the processing work (me), the amount of material, how it is organized, etc. When describing the folders and collection, I have to decide how detailed I want to get in the descriptions. The difficult part is in several areas there are overlaps of information The Abstract gives a brief biography as well as description of the collection. Following that is the Scope which gives even more detail of the overall collection. Then the Biography which goes into even more detail of the person's life.

This collection has a few special challenges in that regard as there is so much information and detail and deciding what is important enough to include and what to leave out.  And, would it be easier to write the brief ones first and then the longer more in-depth ones? Or, the longer ones first and then pare them down for the smaller ones? In this case, I was provided with the Abstract biography part, so it was only where the Scope and Abstract overlapped I had to deal with in this regard. Checking other online finding aides were not much of a help as some merely were copy and paste, making Scope completely redundant.

Another issue that appeared was when I got to near the end of the Biography. Details concerning Rachel's last tour are scant in the collection. I was able to get some of her post military career information from her online blog. In writing it up, I realized that I was getting to an unusual point in regards to many of the collections of the Women Veterans Project, her story is not done. The tendency would be to write this in present tense; however, at the point that someone may be accessing the collection, the information would be in the past and no longer accurate.

Day 13

Day 13
Rachel Brune cont.
Started by making the 3rd custom cover for the green notebooks. It has been a week since the last 2 so it didn't go quite as quick as before. Reminded me a lot of the pains of wrapping gifts - no matter how many times it seems I measure before I cut to make sure I have plenty of overlap, in the end, I come up just a little short. Sadly, this happened in the very last step, requiring me to do the second piece of the cover again. For such a small task, this took longer than I would have cared for.

 We got the CD back from being cleaned and I looked at several of the pictures contained on it. They seemed to be of three sets, two named after troop numbers 704th and 844th. The other was called "Bucca Trip". Armed with this information, I went back to the collection to see if I could find references to these in order to date the pictures.

The collection contains only a few personal letters she had written, so I checked those first in order to rule them out. In the pictures, we could see that she was using her camouflage covered notebook. Her personal notebooks are difficult to read as when writing for herself, her handwriting is difficult to follow. This is coupled with many of the notes are just snippets of sentences. And, there are only a few dates. However, near the middle of the book there was a page with the notation of "photos" and describes several of the photos that I saw with identification of the people involved. No specific date, but at least specific information we did not have before.

The next resource was all of her published articles which makes up a large part of the collection. I did not particularly relish this as it could easily take a long while. I started with the yearbook of the MP Times, an easy collection to scan through quickly. I found the Bucca reference first. It concerned the transition of an interrogation base from the British to the Americans and the work to make it into a base for the Military Police (MP) of which Brune was part. The troop designations followed almost immediately as they supplemented her own, the 800th. On top of that, I found further confirmation this was the time the photos referred to as several of the photos I saw on the disc were reproduced in the paper! I made copies of the relevant pages.

If making the last of the custom covers took longer than I wanted, the research thankfully took much less time that it easily could have. Especially if I had to continue to looking through the individual issues of publications and the many news clippings of her articles and photos that are part of the collection (the Journalism section is 5 folders, almost a whole box by itself).

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.

Day 12

Day 12
Rachel Ann Brune Papers
Today was Arts & Crafts day! I focused on the 3 smallish green hardcover books that Ms. Brune used as notebooks. These books were full of post-it notes and one had some random papers inserted inside the book. In order to retain provenance, it was decided that I would put those in a separate folder, marking which book they were from. However, from the covers, the books are identical. So, first job was to come up with a way to differentiate the books in a logical order and in pencil, mark them "Book 1", "Book 2", and "Book 3".

This was a bit slow going. While there are dates in the books, they are of the day and month, not year. In one, I find a reference to a model 2008 automobile which puts these at being among the most recent of the items in the collection. Something else quickly became apparent: these books are not what we thought they were. Most of the papers reference or are of her Journalism career in and out of the Army. A quick scan of these books showed them to be notes and there's plenty of contact numbers and dates for various events and meetings. Reading them more closely and the notes are more akin to class taking and seem more related to the part of her career as an MP officer. Once I did find some references to the years of 2009 and 2010, I was positive these books were indeed after all of her Journalist writings. One of my first assignments was typing up the pre-interview information concerning her which included the various bases she was stationed at, her dates of deployment, and in what capacity she served. I checked it because I was remembering a detail from that confusing list and was rewarded that this did coincide with what I was remembering, her time in officer's school that was immediately preceding her last deployment.

It is interesting that considering how much we got from her concerning her earlier deployments, from the newspapers she contributed to and all the letters from families and friends, there is comparatively little from this period. There correspondence reduces to a trickle past 2006 with only a single card from 2010. If not for these books, I would have completely forgotten there was another chapter to her career, one that is barely covered apart from what is found in these pages.

A big part of the day was going through and making copies of the post-it notes on "acid free" paper. I tried for the most part to copy the notes as they were on the page. In some cases, she overlapped notes or just plain put notes on top of other notes. One page had almost 12 notes stacked on top of each other. I should point out that the post-it notes varied in size from about the standard small squares to about 3 inches by 5 inches. In those cases, I arranged them in a group to copy on a standard size.

After copying, it was fun with scissors as I trimmed the pages down in order to fit in the books.

I was then shown how to create custom folder/boxes for the books. My background in working in Pre-press at the newspaper came in handy at this point. I was already familiar and comfortable with working with the tools of rulers and xacto knives. By the end of the day, two of the three boxes were created.

Day 10

Day 10 
Brune collection cont. 
Today I finished pulling the duplicate copies of newspapers and articles and copying the articles and photos that were on newsprint. As I have the collection now sorted and in folders where possible, I then went over the collection with my supervisor. We weeded some of the personal items and papers, placing them in the folder with other material already gathered to be sent back to her. The criteria here were items that seemed personal and especially where the provenance is unknown and not related to the purpose of the overall purpose of the collection. Some of it seems to be of the nature of materials that were sent to her by friends and family, but are no longer attached to the relevant letters or senders. Do we really need to keep a prose copy of the fourth issue of Origin, a comic book mini-series by Marvel Comics other than it suggesting that Rachel Brune is a comics fan? We also set aside the few textile and artifact items for separate storage which we will take care of the next day as the quitting time is getting close.
 
Weeding makes me think of various issues involved. With the personal items, such as the money from before, I have to consider that I am trying to make educated guesses as what would be seen as relevant to researchers in the future. To some, the stuff I see as irrelevant might be seen as giving a larger view of what this person was interested in and kept as opposed to earlier and later generations. My supervisor notes that this varies from archivist to archivist as well. Some want to keep everything, others only what is directly relevant. I am learning how she does it, and if I was working someone else I might be seeing slightly different ways. I am glad she makes note of that as it indicates that eventually in my career, I will be deciding my way. So, in some ways, looking through the various collections, how they are labelled and organized are windows on the archivist as well as the archives. 

With the news articles, once I made the copies, recycled the duplicates, the remaining originals are set aside for future education purposes. However, separating the stories from their larger context makes me think of various conflicting issues.  As I previously noted, newsprint is notoriously a poor quality paper and copying the relevant articles on acid free paper for long-term storage makes sense. There is also space to be considered. And, in this case, recent newspapers are probably already being digitally copied and stored by the publishers. Also to consider are copyrights which is a gray area when it comes to making wholesale copies, even for preservation purposes. Yet, most publishers charge for access to their digital archives which goes against the purpose of most library institutions. And, there's no guarantee that those publishers will still be in business decades hence. While the copies of the Brune articles are directly related to the specific collection and the larger collection overall, I have to think there is also value of the larger context of the papers they appeared in; the context of the events the stories take place in as well as the context of her writing style in comparison to other soldier writers and small-town paper writers. The challenge for the archivist is to travel these murky waters and make those judgment calls. In this area, we do have some whole papers that were not printed on newsprint, such as some magazines and a yearbook containing a year's worth of MP Times, a paper that Ms. Brune wrote and edited that was printed on better paper stock than newsprint. So, the context of some of the writings are being kept intact. Again, another archivist might make a different decision, or if there were fewer publications to be dealt with.

Day 9

Day 9
Rachel Ann Brune Collection
I am nearing the end. I finished sorting the materials into their relative groups. The correspondence folders are bulging and now that I have the materials sorted, I went through and broke them down into smaller and more manageable folders of approximate equal size.

Rest of the day was spent going through the many newspapers and copying the relevant articles on "acid free" paper and pulling the duplicate copies for recycling. I am getting the hang of the copier/printer and how to trick it into doing what I want it to do as opposed to what it thinks what I want it to do. It has a color setting, so I make color copies where relevant. Considering the low quality printing done in some of these, it is kind of hard to judge the actual color quality of the copies. My note-taking as I went through the collection helps me in the copying as I had recorded what pages her articles and/or photos were on. This saved me the time of having to hunt through them again.

 Newsprint is known for low grade paper quality and printing. This seems especially true for the military papers, or it may have been the conditions the papers had been kept in. The newspapers from her home-town do not show the same amount of aging though are of the same approximate age. Regardless, many already showed signs of the paper yellowing. I chose the least damaged looking ones of the duplicates for keeping for education purposes as directed.