August 21st- August 23rd

            On Monday, August 21^st, I first began my internship for the John C. Hitt Library’s Special Collections Department. I met my internship supervisor Mary Rubin and gave me information on how to navigate the archives room, use archival equipment and about the collection I would be processing.  The collection, composed of two boxes and a stack of booklets, belonged to Professor Wendell Lawther of the Public Affairs Department of the College of Health and Public Affairs who is now retired. Not only was he a professor but he was a director of the PHD program of the Public Affairs department and many of his documents explored the inner workings of this program through statistics and correspondence. These documents consisting of emails, letters, reports, and many other things are poorly organized and it is up to me to process everything. I was excited to do this because I have never processed a collection before. The previous collection I had examined for the First Unitarian Church of Orlando was already processed and I focused on scanning and metadata. Also, I was not working in the RICHES office instead of a true archiving room. Now, for this internship, I will be focusing on manually organizing the papers and putting them in their own folders. With Mrs. Rubin’s help, I began doing this and I found it to be an interesting task. Going through all the documents nearly seemed overwhelming at first but after much examination, patterns emerged. The documents could neatly be divided into memorandums, email correspondence, budgets, and annual reports. Dividing them by date was also helpful. Along with organizing them I removed the staples and replaced them with plastic ones because plastic does not rust. Also, it was my responsibility to single aside documents with sensitive information such as student names and addresses so that they could be shredded. I left very satisfied with my work and having learned a lot about the archival environment.

            I returned on Wednesday and resumed my processing activities. It was during this day that I read two very interesting documents presented to me by my supervisor. The first one was by Andrew Bauld. It discussed the Saul Bellow collection that was composed of the American author’s personal papers by the University of Chicago Library. The article goes into detail how this collection was composed of numerous drafts of his bestselling novels and his correspondence with other prominent authors, thus allowing scholars to gain fresh perspectives on the author and his work. This article showed me the wide range of subject’s archival collections can encompass. The next article concerned a troubled collection that took place across the Atlantic Ocean, in the United Kingdom. In 1986 a computer based collection called the Domesday Book, after the one that was written in the eleventh century. The 1986 Domesday Book was recorded on discs that could only be read on a special type of computer that is no longer produced. Modern computers cannot read this information. This has resulted in a large archival collection being completely unreadable with modern technology. However, Paul Wheatley has begun a program that is working on recovering the information on the discs but he states that this will be a very difficult task. Reading this I noticed that the eleventh century Domesday Book is still perfectly preserved and readable. This shows that even in this digital age there is still a need for physical records that will not be rendered obsolete by modern technology.