Internship - Day 6.0

A different kind of day...

Today, I was not heads-down in collection processing as I have been in previous weeks. But it was an interesting day nonetheless.

Ayala Science Library at UCI

UCI has four libraries; the Medical, Science, Law, and Main (now Langson) Libraries. Special Collections and Archives (SC&A) is in the Langson, one of the oldest buildings on campus at the ripe old age of 47. Today, I had the pleasure of walking over to the Ayala Science Library and visiting with two of our catalogers. Sarah Wallbank does the cataloging of items (rare books) for Special Collections and Carole McEwan edits the EAD and MARC catalog entries for collections entered into Archivists' Toolkit. Both ladies were very welcoming and generous with their time providing me with an overview of how they support SC&A.

Back at SC&A, my supervisor and I interacted with the student assistant who has been assigned the work tickets for the Environmental Coalition of Orange County (ECOC) collection I processed. We realized that the re-foldering process was causing the collection to outgrow the four document storage boxes, so I incorporated a fifth. Unfortunately this caused a little extra work for the student as it messed up the <box : folder > numbering work she had done. I saw how my inexperience in extrapolating how re-foldering would add a bit of length to the linear footage, and therefore the number of document boxes. I immediately applied this lesson-learned to the current Fair Housing Council of Orange County (FHCOC) collection I'm currently processing.

As far as deliverables today, I handed in three to my supervisor:

• An updated Accession Checklist for the FHCOC collection which corrected the extent's linear footage.
• An updated Processing Work Plan for FHCOC to  eliminate the sub-series level I had proposed for the filing unit organization.
• A revised Accessioning Manual containing several suggestions for improving this useful document for a newby like me. (My supervisor has encouraged any suggestions to improve SC&A procedural manuals.)