It's appropriate that my first UCI Special Collections and Archives (SC&A) accession on the records of the Environmental Coalition of Orange County (ECOC) coincides with the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a foundational document in modern environmentalism. In 1972, ten years after the publication of Silent Spring, the ECOC was formed by environmental activists to bring visibility to issues, concerns, and threats to the region's ecology. The ECOC communicated to its membership and the public by way of its newsletter, Environmental News.
A sister division within the UCI Libraries recently found a box of ECOC materials while cleaning out a long term storage area and passed it along to Special Collections. Because I expressed an interest in regional history (as opposed to University records), the collection was set aside by my supervisor as one of the collections for me to work on.
Documentation
One of the advantages of interning at UCI SC&A is the excellent documentation available on internal archival procedures. The document I'm using today is the Accessioning Manual for Archival and Manuscript Collections (AM). The Accessioning Manual is a 17-page accompaniment to the larger Archival Processing Manual (APM) and provides guidance for the initial handling of materials that come into the custody of SC&A.
Accession Checklist
My work day started with filling out an online Archival Collection Accession Checklist that captures the output of work guided by the AM. Since I'm already comfortable with Archivists's Toolkit (AT), and my supervisor granted me access, I began inputting data into a new AT accession record while using the checklist to as a road map. As I made a quick pass through the unprocessed folders in the ECOC box, I made processing notes on the following areas to help me gather my thoughts about a processing plan and to ask questions of my supervisor :
- Principal names
- Separation candidates
- Restriction/destruction candidates
- Preservation/handling candidates
Paging from the Stacks
I knew I needed to develop a succinct description of the collection's provenance, which is why I asked my supervisor last week about paging copies of the ECOC's newsletter from a processed collection in the stacks. Even though it would have been easier to have one of the student assistants page the specific container, I asked to be shown how to do it myself. My supervisor cheerfully guided me through the steps of finding the container location in the online stacks database, and then walking me into the stacks to find the row, cabinet, shelf, and box. I filled out a paging flag to take the place of the paged box and hefted the box back to my desk. First retrieval accomplished! Later in the day when I had finished using the paged material, I returned the box to the stacks and put the paging flag in the tray to be tallied for reporting purposes.
Accession Record Review
Towards the end of the day, my supervisor and I got together to review my progress. My previously stated goal of having a processing plan ready for her review was not so much overly aggressive as it was inexperienced. I didn't have a processing plan yet, but I had accomplished inputting the accession record in AT. My supervisor made a suggestion on improving the accession description to make it conform to repository standards. She also provided guidance on filling out the access restrictions note. Other than that, I'm ready to move on to developing the processing plan next week.
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