Internship - Day 3.0

Two Deliveries

Today my efforts resulted in the delivery of two documents, an accession checklist and a collection work plan. Both of these forms cover my first assigned collection; the records of the Environmental Coalition of Orange County (ECOC).

ECOC Accession Checklist

Here is the header portion of the ECOC accession record. The Accession and Collection Numbers are determined by checking Archivists' Toolkit (AT) for the next available numbers. The purpose of the checklist is to make sure that a new collection that has come into the Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) is properly received and accounted for even if it is not immediately processed.

I started filling out the checklist and inputting the accession record in AT back on Day 2, but I had not quite finished. I realized that my initial cursory review of the folders in the ECOC box was not thorough enough to provide the necessary detail on condition, disposition, and restrictions. So I took the time to review the contents of each folder at a very high level. I made notes on candidate materials for the following four areas;

• Separation
• Disposition
• Restriction
• Preservation

I'm glad I did the more thorough review as I found more mailing labels than I found the first time. My supervisor advised that these should just be discarded / shredded. I also found correspondence between elected California officials and the ECOC containing original signatures. I asked if they should be restricted to avoid potential theft. (It's not like I found Abraham Lincoln's signature, but I did note that a page with Senator Alan Cranston's signature was already missing.) My supervisor advised that SC&A tends to not restrict correspondence to that level. Additionally, I found a small box of 35mm color film transparencies that constituted the visual portion of an educational slide show. These will receive special sleeving attention but will otherwise not be separated from the paper script found in the same folder.

ECOC Work Plan

Here is the header portion of the work plan developed for the ECOC collection. Some header data overlaps that of the accession checklist. The main purpose of this document is to communicate the significance of the collection to the archivist. This is accomplished by the accessioning processor answering a series of questions designed to assist the archivist with determining how to prioritize the processing of the collection and the level to which it should be processed.

As I made my high level review of the box contents I noted the label text and original order of each of the eighty-five (85) folders. The contents of each folder seem to agree with its label. This indicated to me that, overall, the collection came fairly well-organized. The condition of the folders is another matter. They exhibit some past, light water damage and would benefit from refoldering.

One set of questions on the work plan is; "How will you organize the collection? Is there any existing meaningful order? What series will you use?" Although this was not a difficult question, I found that answering it was the same amount of work as just reorganizing the folder labels I had already captured electronically. Using the suggested series groupings in the Processing Manual I was able to quickly  organize the 85  folders intellectually in the following proposed series and sub-series filing units:

• Correspondence [4 folders]
• Operational records [3 folders]
• Program records
• Air Quality [12 folders]
• Conservation (Energy, Water) [12 folders]
• Educational [6 folders]
• Transportation [5 folders]
• Water Quality [1 folder]
• Project records [26 folders]
• Public relational records [16 folders]

All this fun work was topped off with generating  the AT resource record from the accession record.

Towards the end of the day I presented the above two forms to my supervisor for approval and consulted with her about next steps. She suggested that I write up work tickets for the preservation activities, refoldering, labeling, and reboxing so that the work can be assigned to a student assistant.

Another next step will be to review and complete the resource record. My supervisor advised that she has the student assistants perform the data entry of the filing unit information in AT resource record. That would be the series, sub-series, and folder children. All of the data entry is the realm of the archivist processor.

We also discussed that I would update the estimated time frame for processing based on guidance provided in either the Processing Manual and/or the UC Minimal Processing Guide. Also, I'll look at clarifying the series/sub-series filing unit, and determine if I'll do folder level descriptions.