August 28-August 30

            On Monday, August 28th, I began the second week of my internship. Processing the collection went on as it had last week. With me organizing the documents and being sure to remove the staples and to put the documents with personal information aside for deletion. It was during this day that I noticed the many differences between this collection and the collections I had worked with during my internship in the spring semester. The collection I had worked with previously were processed and the difference between processed and unprocessed collections are huge. A processed collection is easily accessible and the documents were uniform. The collection with the sermons contained documents clearly recording sermons and the collection containing the OMA meeting minutes possessed all of those organized by date. In Dr. Wendell Lawther’s collection, there is a semblance of organization. Folders are labeled but there are a few who are blank and sometimes the labels for folders are misleading. For instance, a folder labeled ‘budget’ might contain memorandums unrelated to monetary issues or a folder labeled vaguely ‘health documents’ might contain a great variety of documents about various departments in the College of Health and Public Affairs. Looking at this current collection I realized how important it is for a collection to be processed. In its current state, it would be impossible for anyone wanting to learn about Dr. Lawther to discover anything useful in the collection he donated to the SCU. This helps me recognize how much responsibility has been placed on me when it comes to processing everything. Along with processing, I learned about the Library of Congress Classification system. I was already familiar with the Dewey Decimal system so the Library of Congress system was very new to me. To test my knowledge about this Mrs. Rubin had me organize a stack of cards with the classification numbers in chronological order.  

The collection however, is not solely composed of loose documents in folders. Stacked next to the boxes are publications. These consist of faculty handbooks, booklets from the Burnett Honors College, fact books for different ranges of years and many other publications. I began processing these on Wednesday, August 30th. Processing these was different from processing the documents because this time I mainly worked with a computer. Mrs. Rubin showed me an excel document prepared for me on one of the SCU’s computers where I entered in information about each publication. This was different from metadata, the focus of this was to state whether the publication was a ‘new item’, ‘new title’ or ‘collection’. If no copy of the publication is in the library’s catalog it is considered a ‘new title’. If there are under three copies of the publication in the library catalog it is a ‘new item’ and if there are above three copies then the publication is a ‘collection’. The ‘new titles’ and ‘new items’ are shelved in the library and the ‘collection’ ones stay in the libraries’ archives. Mrs. Rubin checked the stack of shelving codes I organized and corrected my mistakes. After that, having learned plenty about processing and the Library of Congress shelving system, I left very satisfied.         

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