Bryan McDonough-John C. Hitt Library Internship

I cannot believe it, but my internship has ended today. I have fulfilled the hour requirement and I have finished the coding for the finding aid. A few folders needed to reorganize, and some edits needed to be made, but these were minor tasks that were completed easily. It still needs to be proofread, and my supervisor informed me that it will most likely be uploaded later in next year’s spring semester. Also, the publications that were part of the collection still need to be added onto the finding aid before it is ready to be uploaded. I am very proud of myself and during my internship I have learned a lot about the inner workings of an archival institution. During my previous internship I learned about the digital aspect of archiving, but I was not working in a true archival environment. With this internship it was an entirely different case. I worked alongside professional archivists, learned the coding that went in behind finding aids, learned about series and subseries, and proce...

It is very hard for me to believe but I am almost done with my internship. I’ve been working long shifts on Mondays and Wednesdays, so this has allowed me to acquire plenty of hours. It looks as if next Wednesday will be my last day. However, whether or not I have enough hours, I want to continue until my processing of the collection is complete. The completion of my processing is very close. All the folders have been given proper titles and alphabetization. The alphabetization was a little difficult because I misunderstood my supervisor’s instructions and assumed they only had to be alphabetized per box. Actually, the alphabetization’s relationship with the different boxes didn’t matter, with my supervisor’s help everything was sorted out. Now all I have left to do is the coding and typing up the historical context of the collection, this context will be uploaded to the internet where it will describe the collection to those looking at the Special Collection’s website. The coding is ...

I spent this week dedicated to giving the official titles to the folders in Dr. Lawther’s collection. I have completed excel spreadsheet and condensing all the different folders. I am proud to say that the processing of the collection is nearing completion. Alphabetizing and renaming the folders has been surprisingly easy. When giving them their unofficial titles I wrote them down on the right-hand side of the folder’s top. This allows me to write down the folder’s official name starting on the right, incorporating the left hand original title and date, then erasing the old title when I don’t need it anymore. The old title usually consists of the name and date, while the new title includes the collection’s name, Dr. Lawther’s surname and what series to folder belongs to if it is in one. The two series are the ‘CoHPA’ or ‘College of Health and Public Administration’ series and the ‘FDI’ series which stands for ‘Florida Disaster Intervention.’ All the official folder titles are already ...

This week saw a great amount of change in my usual schedule. Seeing all the folders on the spreadsheet made me realize how many of the dates overlapped. Also, while they possessed slightly different titles, many folders had similar names, the only difference being whether they were plural or not. That is why I went to work condensing the folders whose dates overlapped and who shared similar titles. Also, I finished the excel spreadsheet by entering which box number the respective folders belonged to and arranging the folder names alphabetically. Chronological was the original plan but after seeing the large number of undated folders the internship supervisor and I decided that alphabetical order would be more appropriate. Whenever folders were condensed this excel spreadsheet was updated to reflect the change. To further show this change, a new row was added to reflect the new dates I made so that they could be compared with the original ones. Once all this is done the folders can be ...