Week 10: MWA and a bit of a break

Happy St. Patrick's Day, blog readers! I aligned with my inner librarian today and decided to geek out in green for the occasion. It's only a matter of time before I start wearing eccentric holiday-themed brooches. Haha. To be fair, I saw the Madeleine Albright Brooch Collection exhibition at the Smithsonian over the summer, and it was nothing to be embarrassed about. In fact, it actually made me consider donning a brooch every now and again, though I don't know that I could find or afford any like those on display. In any case, perhaps I'll keep channeling my inner librarian to see if I get the courage and inspiration to go for it.

This week at the Lilly, I continued to process Mystery Writers of America mss. All is going well, but because the collection is so large, it feels like slow going. I've had a relatively easy time assigning series for each folder I encounter, though there are of course a few enigmas. Right now I'm considering the difference between "Writings" and "Printed Material". Perhaps these two series should be joined into one, but when I defined each series individually, there was a definite differentiation. "Writings" was meant to contain manuscript material for books, poems, short stories, screen plays, and other writings written in affiliation with the MWA. "Printed Material" was to contain promotional documents and more ephemeral material, such as brochures, flyers, newspaper clippings, and newsletters. These two categories are clearly related in some sense, and I plan to talk with Craig and Cherry about how to proceed with them next week.

I am also curious as to a small detail when naming files related to a specific event. For example, should a folder be named "Awards dinner 1987" but contain documents dated in the range between 1986-1988, how should the folder be labeled? Should "Awards dinner 1987" remain the title with the 1986-1988 range like this: "Awards dinner 1987, 1986-1988, " or is this too confusing for a researcher? Is it more important to give as much information as possible, accurate dates, or the name of the precise event and corresponding date held? Like I said, small details, but something I'm curious about. If I had no supervisors to turn to and were processing this on my own, I would use the full title plus date range, but this is because I like to include as much information as possible. If, as a processor, I know something about a collection which would be easy to pass on to future users, I generally want to include that information in the inventory or collection description. At the same time, I know that too much text makes a finding aid difficult to browse and mentally digest. Providing over-information may also be a bad habit to start, as though it may be valuable, this practice will likely unnecessarily slow down processing. Given MPLP's proliferation, it's probably safest to err on the side of being a minimalist. Again, something to talk about with Craig next week.

One thing that I really enjoy about keeping this blog is that it forces me to rehash my day-to-day duties and reflect on my strategies, problems, and questions. I often set things aside to revisit later, and reflection helps bring everything back into perspective. Often merely thinking about an issue again once I am outside the context of processing makes me see the potential solutions, reasoning, and repercussions more clearly.

Anyhow, I took some photos of some MWA materials this week. I will share them once I sit down at home with my camera.