Week 6

Today we continued to catalog the 1950s and 1960s, we realize that a large number of duplicate items are in different folders for various years. Which makes it difficult for us to decipher exactly what goes where in the collection. Some photographs have one date in the picture but on the back a completely different date. Starting a collection from scratch I realize can be time consuming, and frustrating if the materials are not any consistent order.

Directed Study Week 5 Part 2

Not much to talk about today we basically cataloged items from the 1930s up until the 1960s. Mainly pictures, correspondence, postcards and technical documents. As we continue to go through the collection, I think that some items would be a great asset to the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham. I wonder will this project continue after we finish, or if our work will be for nothing.

Directed Study Week 5

When my directed study partner Lydia first started talking about unique identifier, and spreadsheets in the beginning of this whole organizing the collection, it all went over my head. However, today once we started working on the meta data, it actually was not as complicated as I intentionally thought. We had a moment where we realized that Mr. Friedmann's desire to have the collection sectioned by radio station just would not work because of how things are all jumbled. So, as a solution we decided to organize by date, which seems to work fine. I found it interesting how each item has a different code, for instance a photograph from the 1930s would be identified as 0001.0002.000001, which the larger the number the more room it allows the collection to grow. Each set of number representing the year, the item type and the number it is in the collection. I have come to the realization that archives is the way for me, but not just any archive, a photography archive.

Directed Study Week 4 Part 2

Another slow day, we are still archiving the materials to what kind of collection this will be. There loads of papers to go through and some things that need not be in this collection, but the problem is that we believe that the Director of this project will not want to part with any of the material, especially the multiple copies. Only thing Lydia, my partner in this study feel we can do is catalog everything, just make sure everything is protected from further deterioration and create a finding aid for the next crew.

Young Adult, that's what I'm reading

I am taking a young adult course and we have to read a lot of literature that is geared towards teens. At the moment I'm reading a bit of Sci-Fi, a book by Garth Nix titled Sabriel. It started off slow for me but it is becoming more interesting, and it deals with a 18 year-old necromancer in a race to save the only family she has left, her father the previous Abhorsen, the title that Sabriel now holds. He may be trapped in Death still alive, so Sabriel hopes. Her journey is marked with dangerous trials and evil monsters determined to kill her, and a cat named Mogget bound to servitude by her family years ago for reasons unknown, and a beautiful stranger Touchstone that she saves from Death returning him to Life. Touchstone has secrets and bond by the same restrictions as Mogget, which Sabriel feels something is wrong, but what? I also finished the graphic novel Tokyo Babylon Volume 1 by the Clamp artistic group, it was hilarious, but they are hard to find and I'm eager to read the rest. At the moment I have an Inter library loan request for the next two volumes, and I'm surprised my Public Library does not have any. OK, so the novel basically is about 16 year-old Subaru Sumeragi, who puts dead souls to rest that have crossed over, see a pattern here, and his twin sister Hokuta Sumeragi whose main purpose seems to play matchmaker with her brother and 25 year-old veterinarian Seishiro Sakurazuka. Seishiro constantly teases and flirts with Subaru, with Hokuta egging him on. The last thing I have to read is a book of short stories called Black Juice, which deals with a variety of things about human nature, including death. When I selected these books to read, I didn't realize they all would be about death, but they are good reads.

Directed Study Week 4

Today was a slow start, we had to wait for Bob to come in and let us into our workspace. We got started about two hours late but accomplished getting a vast majority of the photographs into protective sleeves, as well as the other materials into to archival folders. Now our main goal is to figure out how to organize the collection. I think a lot of weeding needs to be done to decipher what actually should be considered for the collection, mainly because some of the contents are not relevant to what we are trying to accomplish. But the problem is what does Bob want in the collection, and whether his ideas fit with what this project could or should be.

Directed Study Week 3

Today was a slow day for us at WJLD, so mainly we discussed a possible collection development policy for the museum, to provide focus for the project. I also wrote down a few questions to ask Bob Friedmann, so we can document all the information he knows about black radio, and his vision of what the museum should be. I glad we are doing this project because it gives us valuable hands on experience of the beginnings of a museum archive that we could not get from class alone.