I have thoroughly enjoyed the first two weeks of my senior project. Even though the project has proved more challenging than expected – I definitely underestimated the content I would need to survey – the work has been engaging and interesting. Over the past two weeks I have successfully surveyed the entirety of the archives, and have compiled a spreadsheet with all of my findings. I also completed the reading of my bibliography, met with my two seminars twice, and visited the City and Country archives with Yukie.

My inexperience with archives definitely impacted my expectations of my project; even though I understood the day to day of archiving, I was confused about my expected final product. When I visited the City and Country archives, I began to formulate a clearer goal for the LREI archives. The City and Country archive was incredibly organized, thorough, and accessible for the student body. The school had implemented a policy that required teachers, administrators, and students to save their work for processing into the archives, and the early implementation ensured that the archives were much more comprehensive than our own. The LREI Archives, however, have no similar policy, and most of the work saved was either found randomly or gifted by former faculty and admin. City and Country also utilized different forms of categorization than our archives, specifically smaller record groups and multiple ways of sorting through photos. Even though I wouldn’t implement all of these strategies into the LREI Archives, I found them incredibly interesting, and I would definitely love to make some of their practices long-term goals.

Now that I have completed my survey, I plan to begin rearranging and organizing the archives on Monday. This is the section of my project that I am the most excited and nervous about, as my work will absolutely have long term consequences. I have already begun planning one new record group, teachers, and have an abundance of notes from my journal reflections about other new ideas. I believe that the majority of my work will be creating new sub-record groups, and rearranging and categorizing the existing groups as well. Once I complete the arranging section of my project, I will work on creating a finding aid, which documents the organization of an archive. The archivist of City and Country sent me their finding aid, which is incredibly detailed and will absolutely be very helpful. In addition, Yukie found documents from her survey of the archives in 2015, which I will incorporate into the finding aid I create.

Overall, my project has matched up to my expectations, and I have really enjoyed the work I am doing. The only unexpected change was the reality of the LREI archives, which in comparison to the City and Country archives, needs a lot of work and attention. Again, this is mainly because LREI doesn’t have a full-time archivist, a designated room for archives, or an archives policy. While I will probably only be able to help with an archives policy, I still believe that it will improve the condition of our archives.