Internship - Day 8.0

Published on OAC

A major milestone has been achieved by your humble intern. The finding aid for my first processed collection has been posted to the Online Archive of California (OAC). I'll describe the steps taken to make this happen, but first, here's the permanent link to the finding aid of the Environmental Coalition of Orange County records: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82806xg/
Very cool.

Electronic finding aids must be presented to OAC in Encoded Archival Description (EAD). Uploading EAD code to OAC is fairly straightforward, although it does require that your institution has made prior arrangements to contribute. UCI Special Collections and Archives (SC&A) is already an official OAC contributor so we were able to jump right into uploading the code.

Under the guidance of Library Assistant Alix Norton, I input the final data elements into Archivists' Toolkit (AT) needed to submit the ECOC collection to the OAC. With the EAD exported into a text file we made one minor adjustment to the code using a text editor called JEdit. Then, a tool called NetDrive was used to upload (or FTP) the EAD file to the OAC test site. Using the OAC Contributor Dashboard, I ran a verification script to confirm there were no errors in the EAD.

After the verification step was run, a copy of the EAD file was uploaded to the production FTP site using NetDrive. At that point the Contributor Dashboard was used to submit the EAD to OAC for posting to the production site. Alix got an email verifying the submission of the EAD finding aid.

OAC does not actually post anything immediately. The EAD was staged to a queue to await overnight processing. That night, the EAD was posted on OAC and a permanent URL was generated. I had to wait until the next day to actually see my handiwork on the Internet. Next Wednesday when I'm back at UCI I'll update the AT resource record with the OAC permanent URL so it can be included in the MARC record and UCI's OPAC.

Into the Stacks

Back in the material world there was still work to do. The physical boxes holding the ECOC collection needed to be shelved and the stacks locator updated. Interestingly, the finding aid tells a researcher what box a particular folder is located in but not where the box is located. When a researcher requests a particular box, the reference archivist will look up the physical location in the stacks locator. This decoupling between the finding aid and the stacks location allows the archivist to avoid rebuilding and uploading finding aids when collection locations are adjusted.

My supervisor and I trucked the five boxes of the collection down into the Langson Library basement where SC&A has two locked cages containing high density shelving. We selected an open spot and placed the boxes on a shelf. I noted the aisle, stack, and shelf and wrote the combination on the side of each box. That is how the reference archivist will know where to re-shelve the boxes should they be paged by a researcher.

The final task was to add entries to the online Stacks Locator for each of the five boxes as displayed here to the right. The location is read as (basement) aisle "BB10", the "C" (third)  stack of shelves from the left, and the "3" (third) shelf down from the top.

Next week, my goal is to perform all of the above operations for the second collection, the Fair Housing Council of Orange County records.