August 6

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 went smoothly. As for the publications, they were left on the cart and would be sent off to their respective locations in the library later. However, it turned out that there would be no later due to the oncoming arrival of Hurricane Irma.

          
 I was reading two different articles when I received news that the weather would be having an impact on the Special Collections department. The first one came from the Internet Archives Blogs and it announced the arrival of an archive that stored hundreds of televised ads, interviews and debates relating to the current president Donald Trump. Reading this article showed me that archives were not just shelves of dusty, old documents but were also collections of timely and relevant pieces of information. For those wishing to learn more about Trump this newly arrived internet archive would be a very good place to start and it is also a very good place for electronic sources. Still, it is a work in progress and the author invites those to contribute or criticize the archive to improve its quality. The other article had to do with a very different kind of archive. This archive was a physical one belonging to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado. The article detailed how a new cooling system was needed to preserve the ice core samples kept in their archive. These ice cores record thousands of years of the Earth’s temperatures and are important for climate change research. Sadly, unless the government grants them around eight million dollars so the lab can store the ice cores somewhere else while a new cooling system is put in place, the ice cores will have to be donated to other labs or thrown out. I learned from this article how big a factor physical temperature can play in ruining or preserving archival collections. This lesson became more relevant when I helped other people in Special Collections take measures in preserving the UCF’s current collections from the risk of flooding which could occur due to Hurricane Irma. We covered the shelves in plastic tarps in both archives rooms and the boxes located on the lower shelves were placed on higher ones. This event, which occurred entirely by chance, showed me how archives were protected in case of storms and I am very glad it happened. Otherwise, I would have never learned how archives were to be protected in case of natural disasters.       

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