Archival Practicum: Day 3

After taking a small break due to last week's holiday, I was back at my practicum today for my third session. A little update: since I didn't work on my practicum last week, I've decided to update the titles of these posts to the more accurate "Day" rather than "Week".

I continued working on the patient files for the UPH and have already found a nice work rhythm. This week, I processed patient files ALVIS to AYRES (if I hadn't mentioned before, the patient files are alphabetized by patient last name), which finished out the A's. I processed a total of 38 files yesterday, which is an increase from last Monday's 27 files. However, I hope to continue processing faster, because there is a lot of work to be done in this collection!

Yesterday, I started making note of files that have photographs of the patient attached to their application, since I think this might be good information to add to the finding aid at the end of this project. So far, I've seen five applications with photos, and surprisingly, the first I found was also the first female patient that I've noticed. I'll admit, I had short-sightedly assumed that all of the patients at the home were male, so when I mentioned finding a woman's patient file to the archivist, she nonchalantly informed me that women stayed at the home too, because the UPH was available to all members of the ITU. So, this was a nice little surprise, and also caused me to think about my own assumptions of how life was back then.

Censored some of her personal information, just in case.

Lastly, I will start adding updates on my progress and hours to the bottom of each practicum blog entry for my own tracking (and because I love data).

Stats:

• Files processed: ALVIS - AYRES, 38 folders (65 total folders processed)

• Hours: 8hrs (24 total hrs)