Archival Practicum: Day 15

Today, I had another volunteer help me, this time in the morning. I already feel like we are moving a little faster by having more help. I will say that working directly with the volunteers on the same project (instead of just working in the same space) has given me a little bit of experience with supervising and guiding volunteers. I show them what I do and how to process this collection, and then I'm there for any questions. I also double-check to make sure things are still in order afterwards. So, outside of simply being grateful for the assistance, I'm also happy that I'm getting experience leading a project like this.

Last week, I mentioned that I would be rotating the boxes to fit legal-sized folders in them, and today I found that I can fit about 55 folders per box compared to the 60-65 I could fit of the letter folders. This doesn't seem like much, but it will add up, considering that there are still 15 unprocessed boxes with 60-90 folders each.

This week, I also started working on the finding aid, and I've come to realize that I should have been working on this the entire time while I have been processing. Interestingly, this will be the first finding aid completed for this archive, so it's a bit of a learning experience to see what works. Thankfully, the archivist had a finding aid template for me to use, but this is the first time testing it out.

The last thing I wanted to write about is that I talked with the archivist today about continuing as a volunteer once I reach my practicum hours, since I want to see this project through to the end. It's crazy to think that when I first met with the archivist for this practicum, we talked about a few different projects I could work on, and we both thought it wouldn't take very long to get the patient files processed. Boy, how wrong we were. However, I don't know if it's taking a long time just because we underestimated the project, or if it's because I process slowly....

I don't have a photo to share this week, so here is an older photo of the patient files I edited to show the progress so far.

Don't be deceived by the mirror on the far left.

Stats:

• Files processed: HARE - HOLMES, 82 folders (865 total folders processed)

• Hours: 8hrs (120 total hrs)