Week One: An Introduction

[These first-post introductions are inevitably awkward, but I am going to embrace that.]

Greetings, blogosphere! I am creating this blog in tangent with my Spring 2011 internship at Indiana University's renowned Lilly Library. I'll be working in the Manuscripts division, which lays claim to more than 7.5 million items making up a diverse collection of materials dating from medieval to modern. Highlights include, but are certainly not limited to, the papers of Upton Sinclair, Orson Welles, and George Washington's letter accepting the presidency of the United States. I am continually surprised to learn what bits of history made their way to this small city in southern Indiana by one means or another. Please pardon my boasting. I am still getting over the star shocked phase.

As for myself, a brief introduction: my name is Amy Jankowski, and I am currently a graduate student working toward an MLS under the Archives and Records Management specialization at Indiana University Bloomington. I first considered archives as a career path during my senior year of college while employed as a collections registration assistant at the University of Illinois' Spurlock Museum. At the time, my supervisor was working toward an MLS herself and hoped that it would advance her opportunities in working with museum collections. As an anthropology major panicked about how I might find a career for which my interests in cultural heritage preservation would remain relevant, this sounded like the perfect solution. Since then, I have dabbled in museums, libraries, and archives in various capacities, and I am increasingly convinced that this is the right path for me.

Since coming to Indiana University, I have been employed as a graduate assistant at Wylie House Museum--the home of IU's first president, Andrew Wylie, which was restored as a historic house museum in the 1960s--and as a student processor at the University Archives. Both experiences have given me invaluable perspectives into the profession's diversity and how I may adapt my degree in the future. My interest in interning at the Lilly Library is to work more directly with special collection manuscript processing, which will add one more facet to my understanding of the field. Cherry Williams, Curator of Manuscripts, is serving as my official internship supervisor. On a day to day basis, however, I will be working more directly with Manuscripts Archivist Craig Simpson, who will be orienting me to my projects as well as answering all of my minute processing questions over the course of the semester.

My time as an intern will primarily be spent on processing, though I hope to also have the opportunity to try my hand at reference, learn about the acquisition stage collection level description process, and soak up whatever other morsels of archival wisdom may come my way. At the outset, Craig selected the Claxon mss. and Claxon mss. II for me to process. These collections represent the papers of Emma and Neville Claxon, who spent more than thirty years working as Baptist missionaries in Africa. The collections include correspondence, sermons, writings, and a variety of other subject files.

On my first day, I already learned something about the Lilly's acquisition policy, which advises that each distinct acquisition be organized and identified as a distinct collection. For example, though Claxon mss. and Claxon mss. II represent the papers created by the same individuals, they were acquired by the library at two different times through two different individuals--Emma Claxon in the case of Claxon mss. and Carol Polsgrove (daughter of Emma and Neville Claxon, who parted with the materials after her parents' death) in the case of Claxon mss. II. This is interesting to me, as I have worked on amalgamated collections at different institutions in the past, where related materials are combined to form a single collection. I can see certainly see how the Lilly's policy makes sense in terms of intellectual content and original order, both which may represent intellectual relationships and organizational values of the creator. I also gather that this policy is may be related to varying legal terms upon which different collections are donated, purchased, and subsequently made accessible. I plan to search around the archival professional literature for an article related to similar ideals in order to gain a more sound grasp on the Lilly's acquisitions ideology.

Anyhow, having completed my first week as an intern, I can say with confidence that I know how to navigate my way from my work space to the lunch room, a small feat in itself after a whirlwind tour of the building (Ha-ha). More impressively, I can also say that I completed processing my first collection, Claxon mss.! I must be a processing machine, right? Well, not quite. The collection is housed in a single document case box (~0.4 cubic feet), consists of only two series: Correspondence and Writings, and was largely already processed. I just needed to double check that all correspondence was in ascending chronological order, type up the inventory (aka folder list), and revise the collection description. Craig explained the Lilly's streamlined, "assembly line" sort of process to encode and make finding aid materials available online. Working in an abundantly staffed institution certainly makes the process much less arduous on the archives staff! Nevertheless, I hope to eventually try my hand at encoding my own finding aid towards the end of the semester.

As week two of my internship begins, I will continue preliminary evaluations of the materials in Claxon mss. II. This collection was only basically described in terms of probable general series at its point of accession, thus I will need to evaluate the materials, manage any preservation problems, develop a processing plan, refolder, arrange, and describe the materials in more thorough detail. As usual, I just need to keep myself from getting too enraptured by the materials and stay on track with my processing objectives. I am exciting for what the coming weeks may bring!

If my archivally oriented rambling are of interest to you, I hope you will check back on my blog periodically to learn about my progress and any other intern adventures!

Best,
Amy