2020 Internship Blog Post #2
This week
was the second week of my internship and yielded a great deal of useful experience.
On Monday, I primarily finished up going through the binder. This binder, as I
mentioned in last week’s post, examined policies, rule, history, how to create
a finding aid, as well as how to process a collection, and many more very fascinating
things about archival work and preservation.
For the second portion of the day, I took a test on filing call numbers
based off of the call number classification system that the Library of Congress
uses. The test was to sort in alphabetical and numerical order based off of
this classification. All of the call numbers were on note cards. I got all of
the answers correct except two which were turned around or mixed up on
accident. I found the test and this specific classification system to be very
interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed taking this test. The test was a lot of
fun and I learned a lot from it. The last ten minutes or so of my internship on
Monday, I got the collection I will be processing ready for Wednesday by putting
them on a cart so they are easier to move to the computer and back into the Special
Collections and University Archives stacks. Below is a picture I took of the
collection I will be processing on the very first day of seeing them and learning
more about processing the collection. This is how the collection was received.
I also made sure to ask my supervisor at the UCF Special Collections and
University Achieves permission to post this picture to my blog first. Many libraries
and other institutions use the Dewey Decimal Classification System, however,
that being said, the UCF University John C. Hitt Library uses the Library of
Congress Classification System. You may ask why is this significant, well, in
my experience a significant number of libraries, special collections, archives,
historical societies, or any institution that catalogs their material typically
uses Dewey. I was given an example – the
education building on campus has a library the predominately houses educational
material, largely for children and other youth. The Dewey Decimal Classification
System is more accessible for people of all ages including youth, whereas, the
Library of Congress Classification System can be more complicated.
So,
people who might be reading this might be wondering, what this has to do with public
history. As I am learning from both my internship and my Introduction to Public
History course, and that I have learned in my Digital Tools for Historians
course with Dr. French last semester is that while the definition of what public
history is exactly is constantly in flux, changing, and growing, public history
is becoming a field that is accessible for historians pursuing a profession in
the federal government such as the National Park Service, archives, museums, historical
societies, special collections, and many other things.
On
Wednesday, my supervisor had recommended that I do some preliminary research on
the Carol Mundy Collection that has already
been processed to gain an understanding of what the currently processed
collection already looks like, how and why that collection was put into various
series that they were in so I can gain a better understanding of how to process
the collection I am working on. I would like if possible to go back on my own
spare time to look through more boxes with in the already processed Carol Mundy Collection, since I looked
through only one box. I believe I got so distracted with interest with the
contents of the box that I did not look at other boxes. I am hoping to go in to
Special Collections in my spare time to look at a few more boxes that I might be
able to understand on a more in-depth level. For the last portion of the day on
Wednesday I began to look through one of the binders and create a survey of what
was in that binder. It largely had historic site forms along with photos and maps
of the site, all within the city of Eatonville. Upon creating the survey my
notes were too in-depth and were better for research purposes and less so for a
survey. This was a great learning experience for me. This binder also had other
documents including genealogy information from Ancestry.com as well as several other things I have not had
a chance to look at yet. What really struck me, that for the purposes of Special
Collections and the University Archives, when I was writing down the dates on
the forms for the boxes, finding aid, etc. for this specific collection I
thought they would want the dates of the construction of the buildings, not the
dates of the forms being printed. To me the construction date was the more
important date because that was the most historically significant. That being
said, what Special Collections has is the forms in their possession so the date
of the forms and other documents is what is important here. For me this marked
a mental shift for me in how we look at history on a general level, but also on
how public history is so multifaceted. I think it’s important to recognize that
while the construction date in this specific instance is important in general
it is not necessarily important to the information needed in processing the
collection. Next week, I will be continuing surveying the collection and continuing
to process this amazing collection. It is so amazing to me that I just finished
my second week at my internship and I have already learned so much from all of
the archivists and from working hands-on with the collection.
The
University of Central Florida Special Collections and University Archives Website:
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