In this month’s Year in the Life, Kara Flynn shines a beam into some ancient archival murk.
Before sitting down to write my post this month, I was going through some of my previous posts, and I realized that in most (if not all), I start off with some variation on what a busy time it is in Special Collections. . . But not this month! November has been a strangely quiet month—we’ve still had researchers and students in and out, but I get the feeling students have sequestered themselves in other areas of the library as they prep for their finals. This is not to say, of course, that we are at all lacking in projects to work on. As in any archives/special collections department, there is always more to do.
However, this quieter period in the semester has allowed for some real progress to be made on some more logistical projects. I (finally!) finished the processing project I assigned myself way back in July (I talked about it in this post) and the finding aid is now up online. Processing this collection actually sparked the idea for the pop-up event we will be hosting this month, “Cards & Cookies” (which I talked about at the end of my post last month) because of all the old holiday cards I found in the collection. This month, the Special Collections Assistant and our student worker have also been contributing to the processing of our back log, working on individual processing projects of their own.
Another big logistical project we’ve been working on since the beginning of the semester has been revamping what we call the “manuscript room,” i.e. our locked, temperature controlled archival storage area. While I wish I had taken some before photos, you’ll just have to take my word for it that this room was struggling before I got here. Continue reading