Archival Practicum: Day 13

You'll notice that today I didn't process as many patient files, and that's because I spent the afternoon getting prepped for volunteers helping me with this collection. Yep, today I waved my white flag of surrender and asked the archivist if the volunteers could start helping me next week. I'm at 710 folders processed out of I don't know how many, but I'm only in the G's with the rest of the alphabet and several more boxes to process. This afternoon, I went through and started completely organizing/alphabetizing the rest of the boxes (got to 'T'). I know, I know, I was living dangerously, and this was something that I should have done day one, but I think I was just excited to get started back then. Thankfully, so far as I've gone through them, I haven't found anything that's crazy out of order or that would require me to redo box/folder numbers. But I wanted to make sure this gets done before any volunteers start helping me, since I imagine it will move faster, and I won't have as much time to make sure the old boxes are in the right order. Next Monday, I'll start the day off finishing them.

Other than that, there are only two interesting things to discuss (and no photo today, bummer). The first is that I have a new 'oldest document', this time from 1921, so I updated my date range for the finding aid. The other interesting thing was a patient file from the 1940's where the patient said he had worked in the printing field for 31 years... yet he was 37, so I guess that means he started at the ripe old age of six years old?? Which, I suppose was probably somewhat normal in the early 1900's. Still, though, I wonder if maybe he wasn't being exact...

Stats:

• Files processed: GALLUP - GOULD, 55 folders (710 total folders processed)

• Hours: 8hrs (104 total hrs)