October 9-October 11

Progress with processing the collection continues to go at a steady place. One problem is the abundance of loose documents without titles or dates, so I have decided to just put those in their own folder. Besides that, I haven’t had any problems sorting through all the different documents. One important thing I noticed is that my folders are not in alphabetical order. When it comes to creating a finding aid this will create a problem. Once I am done processing everything, or even before that, I will have to alphabetize them all. Also, I will need to sort them by date to since the years are all over the place. This may prove to be difficult because the dates on most folders have a wide date range. After the remaining folders will come the binders and after processing those I will be all done with the second box. Looking through all the documents I managed to learn some more about Dr. Lawther, he was a professor at UCF for a long time, teaching since the 1980’s until the 2000’s. He was not only in charge of the PHD program

During this week I read some very interesting articles. They had to do with archiving methods in the popular film series of Star Wars and to my surprise I found them to be very insightful. The first article by Sarah Jeong, points out in the Star Wars films that there are too many disk formats and how strange it is that the protagonists are easily able to access the data ports of the enemy since those data ports should have been encrypted. She also mentions an archival facility that shows up in the recent film, Rogue One, and all the problems it has. Another discrepancy she points out is that in the prior films data storage devices are smaller than the ones that show up in later movies. In my view, this all goes to show that creative writers don’t put too much thought into archiving. They understand what it is, the storage of collections of information, but they don’t understand the intricacies behind it. Also, the movies were made with entertainment first in mind and it would have been to previous for all the writers to go into depth about archiving when the viewers are more interested in the characters and conflict. As for the discrepancies between movies, that can easily be explained by them being written and directed by different people. The problems of the Rogue One archive are the focus of the second article by Jon Tilbury. This archive required the user to use unwieldy mechanical claws to grab records and it was in a large tower. Reading it, I’ve realized that perhaps the archive in this movie was so difficult to use and impractical was for dramatic purposes. If the characters were able to easily find their information in a couple seconds that would make for poor entertainment. Still, I think a realistically functioning archive would be able to work in a movie but not an action one that requires a fast pace. A mystery movie would be the best kind to feature an archive because that would allow to the director to explain the function of an archive without disrupting the narrative, since the characters might have to look for evidence in one.