I have really enjoyed the past week of my work, and am incredibly excited about the second half of my archives work. On Monday, I completed the survey section of my project, and on Wednesday, I began reorgainzing and creating a finding aid. Even though I absolutely loved the work of surveying, I think the reorganization and finding aid will be the most engaging aspect of my project, as my work will have a permanent impact on the construction of the archives, and therefore how we interact with our school’s history.
The purpose of my survey was to understand the current state of the LREI archives; specifically, the documents and objects that the school has saved, and to diagnose where the archives were incomplete. While the majority of the archives are sorted into record groups (currently, we have six), a large portion are still to be processed, and many are in record groups that may not be correctly categorized. Inside the record groups, the documents are usually unlabelled, and the categorization differs between groups. The large majority of materials hasn’t been digitized, besides a select group of photos and many of the yearbooks. While digitizing the archives isn’t part of my project, I hope that the categorization work I am completing will help make it easier in the future.
On Wednesday, I met with Yukie, the archivist, to discuss the reorganization of the archives. We had already planned to create a new record group, teachers, and we analyzed different possibilities for materials that would fall under the new category. I think these discussions and questions are the most important aspect of my learning, because a considerable amount of the work of archivism is making “judgment calls”, or making informed decisions about where a given material would best be categorized. For example, when we visited City and Country, the archivist discussed categorizing photos, which are sorted by date and “subjects” (ie. plays, schoolwork, field trips); the photos could either be organized by decade, with subcategories of subjects, or by a subject, and then internally sorted by decade. Because the City and Country archives are so thorough, they ended up copying each photo, and using both organization methods, but at LREI, we usually need to decide on the one method that would be most beneficial for the student body.
After meeting with Yukie, I began to reorganize the first record group, Elisabeth Irwin. Initially, there were three subcategories: letters and papers, photos, and writings, and we decided to rearrange their order, beginning with her writings, then photos, and then ending with her personal letters and papers. As I went through each box, I individually labeled and categorized each material on a finding aid, and organized them so similar materials were adjacent to each other. I decided to remove a portion of the work in the folders that didn’t particularly pertain to Elisabeth Irwin, but was more about the LREI curriculum, to incorporate into the Teachers record group later. Again, I think it is in these decisions in which I am learning the most, because these decisions require an understanding of archives, and accessibility, which is incredibly important to the work of an archivist. By Friday I had finished organizing two boxes, and was halfway through the last one of the Elisabeth Irwin record group. I was surprised at how time-consuming this work can be, and it will definitely impact the trajectory of my project. While I never expected to categorize the entirety of the archives, I now know it is more realistic that I will complete one-three record groups during this project. I believe that it is more important that I am thorough, over efficient, because the work that I am doing now will help create a structure for the archives in the future.