Week 4-6: Historic Maps Project

For the past few weeks me and the other intern have been working with our Harrisonburg Historic Maps collection which we are currently trying to reprocess. Special collections received another collection of maps last semester that need to be incorporated into our current collection, so while we take inventory of the new maps and put the two collections together, we will reprocess them in order to create one, succinct collection that is easily accessible.

Most of the maps are plans for new infrastructure, such as widening a street or adding sewer lines through someone's property. The rest of the collection is full of individual's plots of land that is either being exchanged between two people or between the City of Harrisonburg and the land owner. I've included a couple pictures here of various maps in the collection:

We started working with the new collection by first ordering all of them by date and making sure we had every map from the inventory with us. After this we discussed with Kate how to best combine the two collections. We came across multiple small maps in the new collection and decided that we should take those out and combine them with our current small maps collection.

This whole process has taken quite some time as there are a lot of little things we have to keep track of, such as correctly ordering the maps in a spreadsheet and making sure they are all in chronological order and alphabetized within each date. After the spreadsheet was complete with all the maps combined, both old and new collection, we have to incorporate all the new maps within the original collection.

Currently, I have gone through half the folders from our original map collection and incorporated the new maps from those dates into the collection. After all the maps are in the same place, we will have to go back and re-label each map with a map and folder number.


As for the Brian Flota Comic Book Collection I was previously sorting too, I finished going through all 20 boxes and correctly checked each date. Currently that project is on hold as I am spending most of my time with the map collection

Week 3: Archival Processing

This week I was introduced to how Special Collections processes material and creates a finding aid online to help others understand what is in the collection. We went through a presentation that showed us the basics of archival processing, including how to name a collection, how to create finding aids for the collection, and various terms regarding collections.

Eventually, I was able to create my own finding aid for a small collection. I was given John A. Frenger's account book and two newspaper articles along with it and had to put all of that information in the finding aid. It was really cool looking through the account book, and he even kept a diary in parts of it. Most of the entries were about the weather, since he was a farmer, but the coolest part was his writings about James Garfield's assassination. In one entry in July, he mourns the death of Garfield, although at this point he had only been shot and was not yet dead. Over the next couple of months, he periodically mentions how Garfield seems to be recovering well and may even make a fully recovery. In the end, however, he put a "Special Entry" on the day Garfield finally passed away and mourned the death of who he called a "good friend." This was a really good experience to see exactly what we need to put online for others to see so they know exactly what they can find in our collections before they come to us.

On my last day of the week, I spent the entire afternoon working with the Brian Flota Comic Book Collection. I had previously worked with the inventory list and finding aid of the collection and had to go through all the entries and correct any spacing or other mistakes found in there. As it turns out, though, some of the dates entered in the spreadsheet did not correctly match up with the comic book date. Because of this, I started going through the twelve boxes in the collection, pulling each comic book out one by one, and making sure the date correctly matched the one written down. I only made it through three of the boxes and although it was extremely time consuming and tedious work, it will pay off in the long run and is necessary to make sure we have the correct information available to the public