Week 10, Part 3: Completion and Satisfaction

Today I finally finished Box 468. I spent the morning uploading the last items into Media Manager. It was a little difficult because it had been so long since I looked at the items. Though 4 days may not seem that long, since I was processing such a large amount of items, it was easy to forget exactly what they were. I relied heavily on the notes I took on Tuesday and kept referring to the digital images to jog my memory. It took a little longer than I had hoped, but I finished the last 10 items within an hour and a half.

Laura and I discussed a specific group of items from which I had drawn a very important connection. In Week 7, I found a collection of drawings by Frank Lemon and was very adamant in researching them in order to find their relevance to each other and to the Byrd collection. I found an additional plate (a new word I learned that describes these loose leaf paintings that belong to a book) that depicted Charles Lindberg's famous transatlantic flight in 1927. This week I found the actual book cover to Flights, Unforgettable Exploits of the Air. This is amazing!! It is such a rare book and the only other copy that I was able to find in my research belongs to the Library of Congress. The book cover is slightly dirty, though we are going to be speaking to a preservation specialist about cleaning it up. Laura and I both agreed that it could make a great exhibition piece. I felt so excited that I was able to find these seemingly unrelated 4 pieces that had been strewn randomly across the collection and was able to put them together into something more.

When I first found the book cover, I wanted to pull the other plates to compare them. The current method of finding stacks locations for the boxes is fairly arduous in that you have to open a very large Access database file and find the specific box number then copy down the location. This seemed overly complicated since I have already been including the Box and Item numbers on each Media Manager record. I came up with the idea of adding the location numbers to the Media Manager record in order to have all pertinent information in one place. I am beginning to not only see this project as a great access method, but also as a visual finding aid to the collection. I spent about an hour adding stacks locations to every Media Manager record, which will help immensely both for patrons who are interested in an item and for Laura who can visually see which item she wants to pull and have the information handy on the same page.

In addition to all of this, Laura also walked me through the steps of accessioning new material. She had a small box that had recently come into the collection and showed me how she processes it. It was a great learning experience for me, as I have read about how to do it, but have never seen it done.

All in all, today was a day of completion and satisfaction. It's been a long week, but I believe I can finish the rest of my practicum hours next week. Though it will be sad to no longer be a part of the Polar collection, I am excited to begin my thesis paper.


In: 1:30 p.m.
Out: 5 p.m.
On-site hours completed today: 3.5
On-site hours completed total: 84.25
On-site hours left: 15.75