Internship - Day 5.0

Second Collection Accessioned

The Environmental Coalition of Orange County (ECOC) records have now been delegated to the student assistant force here at SP&A for labeling. So I began work on the second collection assigned to me.

The Fair Housing Council of Orange County (FHCOC) is a similarly sized collection as the first; one archives box full of paper. I was determined to leverage the knowledge gained from working on the ECOC records to process this new collection more efficiently and in much less time.

Fair Housing Council of Orange County

The Fair Housing Council of Orange County is a private non-profit organization formed in 1965 in the wake of the civil rights movement that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Council incorporated in 1968, the same year that Congress extended civil rights protections to cover housing with the adoption of the Fair Housing Act. The FHCOC is apparently still going strong at 44.

The contents of the archives box were a bit of a mess. Unlike the ECOC records which were already sorted into 87 labeled folders, the FHCOC papers were loose with nearly no folders at all. The papers were stacked in two piles within the box which made determining the original order a bit of a challenge. I pulled all of the papers out of the box and placed them on my desk maintaining the original order as best I could.

I quickly reviewed each of the piles of paper on my desk taking quick notes about the types of documents found. This general inventory is a good way to begin to organize the documents intellectually for a proposed arrangement. The good news is that the contents pretty much fell into only three major categories; court documents, city planning documents, and FHCOC newsletters.

To save time I simultaneously filled in both accession documents I needed to generate; a new record in the Archivists' Toolkit accession module and an accession checklist in Word. Since the FHCOC is still in business I was able to cut and paste administrative history data directly from their Web site, wordsmith it in one place and copy and paste the new blurb into the other. There were no preservation issues, no non-paper items, nor content needing to be restricted. I made good time and moved right into spawning the AT resource record from the accession record and began filling out the processing work plan.

At the end of the day I was able to submit both the accession checklist and processing work plan to my supervisor for review. A very productive day in which I easily halved the amount of time it took me to do a similar amount of work on the first collection.