Bryan McDonough-John C. Hitt Library Internship

I have made very good progress with my processing this week. I have finished all of the first box except for a binder and I have gotten a start on the second box. Unfortunately, I was unable to process the binder because I did not know how. However, with the arrival of my internship supervisor next week I will be able to learn how to do that type of processing. Another I still need to do is reorganize the publications back into the three groups I have discussed in an earlier posting. While retrieving my collection from the archive after Hurricane Irma the publications were disordered. Another thing I would like to reorder is my work in the first box. Now that I have finished that one, I believe it would be beneficial to review my work and see if I can make it more organized. I believe that there are some folders that can be merged with others and certain folders that can be divided into more numerous folders, more specifically titled, folders.   Speaking of archives, my readi...

It felt strange returning to the Special Collections Department after a week-long absence due to Hurricane Irma. Fortunately, only a few items were damaged and the collection I was processing was still safely stored in the archives room on the first floor. All I needed to do was transport my collection back to the Special Collections room on the fifth. While processing the many materials I have come to wonder how certain collections fell into Lawther’s possession in the first place. Many documents are letters that were sent to other professors in the College of Health and Public Affairs. One letter was even sent to a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice. Another document that seemed unrelated to Dr. Lawther and the College of Public Administration was a printed receipt that recorded the prices of various computer equipment. Unfortunately, Dr. Lawther has left behind no notes in his collection explaining his reasoning for including certain types of documents. Overall, this r...

This proved to be a very interesting week for my internship, it was a short one but in that short amount of time I learned a lot. Due to Special Collections being closed on Labor Day I arrived on Wednesday and was planning to show up on Thursday to make up for my earlier absence. I finished diving Dr. Lawther’s publications into their three separate groups and got to work on further processing his collection. One of the difficulties that have arisen from processing such a larch group of documents was the fact that some documents seemed to be completely unique. This made them hard to group together into a new or older folder. As a temporary solution, I have created a folder titled ‘Miscellaneous’ and have put the documents that defy categorization there. It is my hope that when I have finished processing the first out of two boxes I will have noticed similar documents to the ‘Miscellaneous’ ones which will allow me to begin making more specific categories. Besides that, the processing ...