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