Week 2: Training and More

My first couple of weeks here at Special Collections has definitely been a new and challenging experience. The first couple days were a little overwhelming, trying to learn the proper procedures for overseeing the reading room and finding out exactly where everything is located in the collections, but I am slowly feeling more and more comfortable with these every day.

On the last day of my first week, I was finally able to participate in an upcoming project for Special Collections called "Color Our Collections." This is a nationwide event in which archives and special collections from across the country are digitizing images from their collections and then allowing anybody to print them off to color them, thereby drawing more attention to the collections. For a few hours I looked through multiple editions of St. Nicholas, a popular children's literature magazine from the late 19th century, and some of the old JMU yearbooks. This was my first experience actually handling and looking through a book that old and it was a pretty incredible experience. I was able to find a ton of cool pictures from the stories that would be great for coloring, and even got the chance to read a lot of the stories, most of which were actually pretty amusing. Here are a couple of the pictures I found:

During my second week, I helped with another project: taking inventory on our collections of "The Virginia Teacher," a popular teacher's magazine from the early 20th century. I was responsible for going through every copy we had, nearly 20 years worth of the monthly magazine, and record the date and volume number for each. It was definitely a tedious task that took up most of my time for the day, but it was good experience that shows the kind of minor tasks necessary to help Special Collections run. The day before the snowstorm hit us a couple classes came in to learn about our Special Collections and take a tour of the archives. While they were up in the collections, me and the other intern looked through old yearbooks to find pictures of snow at JMU. There were some pretty humorous pictures, even one of a couple students carrying a case of beer through the snow. So far, my first couple of weeks have been a learning curve but an enjoyable one, and I look forward to learning more about archives and working on more projects around the collections.