2020 Internship Blog Post #5
This week,
at the UCF Special Collections and University Archives, I continued to work on my
survey of the binders in the collection. It is quite exciting to see as the days
go on, the binders get fewer and fewer. However, upon briefly looking through
several of the binders this week I found that there are three more binders not
counting the one I had to put on hold temporarily because of trying to figure out
what was already a duplicate from other folders in the collection that had been
rehoused previously. In my learning, sometimes accompanied by frustration and
stress, I am potentially perhaps seeing the intent Carol Mundy had with creating
so many duplicate photocopies of these documents. I had previously wondered if
there was a theme to the collection other than that of “African American Legacy”
like the other Carol Mundy Collection also housed at the UCF Special Collections
and University Archives, or perhaps of certain locations. I believe so much of
my time in this internship thus far has been fixating over trying to find duplicates.
Largely, my frustration arises in understanding, grappling, learning, and
decided which duplicated documents to keep, but isn’t that what education is…a
learning process. What I mean by this specifically is that often many of the
duplicates look only slightly different with predominantly no change and I have
to decide whether to keep it with another that is similar. Other times there
are three or more of the same document in the same binder or folder and I have
to put them in a special box of duplicates to be returned. By no means am I
upset by this I just strive to do the best work I can possibly produce. I deeply
want to understand what she had intended for the collection, and how she would
want the series to be created for the collection. I want to do my best in the
way she would want it to be. As far as the census data goes, I believe I
mentioned in a previous blog, perhaps the people in this census data are
important in multiple locations in not just Florida but also the United States
more broadly. Perhaps, it is quite impossible for me to understand why Ms.
Mundy choose the documents she did.
When I went into the UCF Special
Collections and University Archives today I completed a binder from this
Wednesday but I also started and finished another binder (#7) today, as well.
This binder was a wealth of information. This binder was home to documents (all
photocopies or printed copies) on the Civil Rights Movement, the KKK, and FBI records
on select cases. So far this has been for the most part one of the only binders
with a theme that is constant throughout and that all has to do with the rest
of the information in the binder can perhaps be linked. Other binders have had
themes but they have had to been split up into separate folders, since the
theme throughout does not work together or there are too many documents to fit
in one folder.
On a slight side note, I would like
to briefly mention the idea of sensitivity in history and public history. In my
mind, it is always important to keep one’s audience in mind when one is writing,
creating an exhibit, and so on. I would also say sensitivity to one’s audience is
also especially critical with individuals who may have experienced difficult
pasts, such as, Holocaust survivors, people who experienced other hate crimes
like African Americans attacked by the KKK, and other victims. We discussed
sensitivity and confronting difficult pasts in Introduction to Public History a
few weeks ago. During this week I was one of the individuals leading the
discussion because I truly believe this is an extremely important topic. How
can we be more sensitive to their needs as historians and more specifically,
public historians? Can this be applied to special collections, archives, and historical
societies? How so? I think sensitivity is an extremely important topic to
always keep in our discourse as historians and public historians.
The
University of Central Florida Special Collections and University Archives
Website:
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