Week 3: Overview and Update

Overview:

This is the week when the scope of the types of projects for the internship came into clear view. My meetings with Mane over the past two weeks have completely oriented me to the structure of the Archives and now I am immersed in the Courier Archive project. My meeting with Mary Ann last Friday determined the nature of the Campus Digital Archive project and I have begun to organize for the upcoming meetings with participating departments on campus. These two projects have the highest priority on my list of goals and objectives.

Lower in priority (but not importance!) are the new cabinet's organization (and finding list), updating all the location lists, updating the Policy/Procedure manual, and basic organizational duties. There are certain tasks that may take higher priority in the future such as the digitizing of the bound campus newspaper archives.

Courier Update:

My headway in the Courier archives is going very well. I have begun to sort the many envelopes by date. Once I have them in chronological order, my task will be to examine the contents (proof sheets). I have three sections of folders (proof sheets) developing: 1) General, 2) Sports, and 3) Mixed General and Sports. This stems from the journalism department's method of organizing. It seems that before 1974 there was no distinction between General and Sports, hence the Mixed category. The envelopes (proof sheets) will also be shelved with the folders as they are sorted.

I am excited to say that I have found envelopes that include proof sheets for Airplay, Focus, and Prism (originally marked separately). These have been put in a different area to reduce confusion from the Courier archives. While important, I am guessing that these proof sheets will take just a notch less priority than the Courier archives. They can be housed in the same manner (folders) and in tandem with the Courier archives.

Campus Archive Project (CAP) Update:

First and foremost I have read Mary Ann's reports and I find them fascinating. The fact that digital archiving is a viable means of storing and making available a campus' rich history is an impetus for grant writing and masters theses across the state! With the proper funding, a whole new era of archiving can bloom.

I look forward to setting up meetings between Mary Ann, myself, and the departments that responded to the survey that Mary Ann included in her PCC report. I can't wait to see what treasures and invaluable historical information is out there!

Next Week:

Note: My usual Tuesday schedule for working in the archives has been thwarted by Flex Day, so I will have to do my work on Monday,Wednesday, and/or Friday.

Goals for next week:

1) Continue sorting and organizing the Courier archives. If I finish the sorting, I will begin to examine contents.

2) Obtain Mary Ann's schedule and draft an email to send to the departments. I will also develop a simple sheet to take to the meetings that can be used describe the contents of the departments' archives for general statistics on the volume and nature of material that needs to be digitized.

3) Continue updating Policy/Procedure and Finding List folders.

Until next Monday!

Blog Up!

I must say I have learned quite a bit about blogs this morning. I have an inactive blog for one of my UCLA undergrad courses in Library Science (http://jbis20.blogspot.com/) but I had no idea how to incorporate an RSS feed!

Luckily, my concurrent course in Cataloging (Lib 105a) required that I sign up with a blog aggregator (Bloglines). So, I have been becoming familiar with the idea of subscribing to blogs over the last two weeks. I spent some time and figured out how to imbed RSS subscription icons in the blog (top of left column).

To do so, I set up an account with FeedBurner (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home). This company has been acquired by Google just like Blogger, so the process for making the blog a feed was easy with the help options.

What is it all for? Well, if you would like the blog posts to come directly to you, choose one of the options (Yahoo!, Google, Bloglines, or a reader). Follow the prompts and options to set it up! Let me know how it goes!

More posts to come!