Internship - Day 12.0

Refinement

Much of today was spent heads down reviewing my first collections and applying corrections. The exercise of upgrading the processing level on the ECOC and FHCOC collections from minimal to moderate involved the application of new work by student assistants and by an intern (me). This of course had the effect of introducing new errors in the form of typos and unmet requirements.

As I compared physical file folder labels with the data input into Archivists' Toolkit, I found discrepancies that needed to be fixed between the two. Through a combination of the backspace, an eraser, and a pencil I brought the two sides back in alignment. As usual, my supervisor had some great feedback that only improved the quality of the finding aids for these two collections.

New Challenge

The rest of my day was spent working on a new challenge presented to me by my supervisor . Special Collections has a backlog of  five collections previously processed by student assistants. They needed to have some quality control (QC) applied before they could be considered complete. My supervisor explained that as a future archivist who will be supervising non-archivists, I could benefit from checking the work of our student assistants. This will give me a chance to apply the learning I've gained over the previous three months.

We agreed that I would pick one of the five student-processed collections and develop a list of recommendations for improvement. My supervisor would then QC my QC,  provide feedback, and then have me apply the agreed upon changes.

Old days on the Irvine Ranch.

The collection I picked to QC first was MS-R160 -  Committee of 4000 records, a group of Irvine area homeowners who lived on land leased to them by the Irvine Ranch/Company and argued that their original lease terms were unrealistic in the 1970s climate of soaring Orange County real estate prices. By the end of the day I delivered my QC recommendations to my supervisor for review. Next week I'll tackle the other four collections.