Intern at UC Irvine Special Collections & Archives: Final thoughts

Meet the Intern

During the fall of 2012 I had the pleasure and privilege of working as an archival intern at UC Irvine Libraries Special Collections and Archives (SC&A). For a graduate MLIS student interested in being exposed to archival best practices in a professionally run environment, UCI's SC&A easily fits the bill.

I am an Information Technology professional by trade and I volunteer for a California desert historical society in my free time. After thirty years of making a living in business information around Orange County, I decided to pursue a second career in history information -- an occupation otherwise known as archivist.

Archivists preserve and make accessible the documentary evidence of our American heritage. It is a somewhat obscure profession (there are only 6,000 practicing, and 1,100 certified archivists in the U.S.), yet it is the only one dedicated to maintaining the existence of our historical record. Archival practice is rooted in librarianship and students are typically educated through a master's program in library and information science (MLIS) or history.

As part of the MLIS educational experience students are encouraged to obtain practical experience by means of internship programs in working archives. I work and live in south Orange County in southern California. The UCI campus has been a recurring theme in my life although my higher education has been obtained primarily from Cal State institutions. Through my coursework I was familiar with Michelle Light’s publications and learned she was the Head of Special Collections, Archives, and Digital Scholarship at UCI. From her presentation at the 2011 Society of American Archivists conference I learned that the department she managed was at the forefront of archival practice. I introduced myself and she encouraged me to apply for an internship at SC&A.

The learning outcomes I intended to satisfy through my internship revolved around the gaps in my practical knowledge of how to process archival collections. My MLIS coursework and supplemental reading of archival science literature have provided me with the principles and knowledge required, but the practical skills that come from hands on processing were missing. Life experiences have taught me that there is no substitute for understanding the particulars of a process other than to roll up one’s sleeves and personally perform the work. UCI SC&A offered me the opportunity to test theories and to practice skills by engaging in a field-based learning experience. Secondary considerations that contributed to my site choice were the desire to be guided by professional archivists, work in an environment utilizing best practices and technology-based solutions, and to process regional (Orange County) collections.

The Internship Site

The UCI Libraries, Special Collections and Archives houses the UC Irvine Libraries' collections of rare books, manuscripts, archives, photographs, and other rare and special materials. The department is home to the scholarly archives of some of the campus's most noteworthy present and former faculty members, including philosopher Jacques Derrida, Nobel Prize-winning scientists F. Sherwood Rowland and Frederick Reines, and choreographers Eugene Loring and Donald McKayle. Students, researchers, and community members are encouraged to visit and use the collections and services available within the department’s reading room.

The Special Collections and Archives department, stacks, and reading room are situated on the top floor of the main or Langson library. The reading room is a large, neat and pleasant environment of large tables with large windows overlooking the campus. The reading room also shares space with a limited number of stacks and map files.

Staff offices, cubicles, student assistant work areas, and additional stacks are located off the reading room. Additionally, there is separate secure space on the fifth floor with work and storage space and where bulk archival supplies are kept. In the basement of the Langson, SC&A has several compact stacks behind two locked cages within the academic library space. Lastly, there is a work area in the newer Ayala Science Library where a project archivist is stationed processing regional collections.

Outreach activities conducted by SC&A include both traditional exhibits and use of social media. During the fall Special Collections displayed “LGBT Communities in Orange County: Highlights from the Archival Collections” in the Special Collections and Archives lobby exhibit cases. Publicity for SC&A public programs is disseminated through its New & Noteworthy Collections blog and the UC Irvine SC&A Twitter feed. There are efforts currently underway to digitize early University materials for presentation in a web-based content management system. This is being done in anticipation of UCI's 50th anniversary in 2015.

Back in the staff area of the Langson, one of two cubicle spaces is set aside for sharing by transient resources such as interns. It’s a nice space with a networked computer, a decent amount of flat work area, and a window view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Archivists’ Toolkit is the archival data management technology used along with a home-grown Stacks Locator for logging the locations of shelved collections. Other utilities such as JEdit and NetDrive used to upload EAD to OAC are covered in my Day 8.0 blog post.

In addition to putting in a full day of interning once per week at UCI Special Collections and Archives, I maintained a weekly blog called Archivist Apprentice. To generate additional interest in the blog postings, a companion Archivist Apprentice Twitter account was used to tweet the presence of new postings to followers.

Internship Reflections

Overall, my internship at the UCI SC&A was a personal success because I was able to accomplish the goals I set out for myself. Most of my MLIS coursework has revolved around archival theory. This internship was my opportunity to apply that theory in a practical setting in highly organized archives under professional guidance. At its core, my plan was to process manuscript collections from “soup to nuts,” and the wonderful archivists at UCI helped me do just that over the course of 138 hours of hands-on work on seven collections comprising 7.6 linear feet of processed material.

To make the best use of my short time “on station” at my internship, I would spend the first half hour or so of my day determining what I needed to do to complete a module of work before I went home. I did not want to leave in the middle of any one task and lose my train of thought before I came back a week later. This required me to plan what tasks I could get done in a day, sometimes employing unfamiliar procedures. I learned to manage my time carefully which allowed me walk out the door on my last day with seven completed collections ready to be uploaded to OAC.

Sometimes, I think it was the small decisions, the ones that were neither intuitive nor spelled out in procedure manuals that were the most difficult aspects of the work experience. There are some things that are learned only by asking someone in the know and the archivists at UCI, especially my site supervisor, were generous with their time and knowledge.

From my internship I gained confidence with and practical knowledge of accessioning, rehousing, arranging, describing, preserving, shelving, creating finding aids, and generating and uploading EAD code to the Online Archive of California (OAC) for paper-based collections. In terms of more advanced archival techniques I was able to apply minimal processing concepts, DACS standards, and Library of Congress subject headings. At UCI, I had the privilege of working with archivists who are serious about adhering to professional and internal standards. As my supervisor said to me, “our finding aids and the presentation of source materials are how our patrons judge the quality of our work. Let’s be consistent, accurate, and neat!”

UC Irvine will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the campus in 2015. The Special Collections staff has been tasked with developing retrospective exhibits to honor that major milestone. One of the issues of concern to the SC&A staff is how they are going to digitize the massive amount of photographic materials from the earliest years of the school and make them available in a content management system with limited resources and no funding. I like to think that my processing of a handful of less time critical paper collections may have in a small way freed up some resources for the archivists to apply to the University’s half-centennial project.

If the success of my internship were to be quickly summed up in terms of processing output then the answer would be the finding aids of the following seven small collections posted at the Online Archive of California:

MS-R160, Committee of 4000 Records, 0.2 linear feet
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8kp82qz

MS-R161, Orange County Commission on the Status of Women Records, 0.4 linear feet
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8fx7b0n

MS-R162, Orange County Human Relations Commission Records, 1.2 linear feet
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8qz2bjr

MS-R163, Collection of Clippings on the Development of Irvine, California and Orange County Local Agency Formation Commission, 0.6 linear feet
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8m61kvs

MS-R164, Environmental Coalition of Orange County Records, 2.0 linear feet
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82806xg

MS-R165, Fair Housing Council of Orange County Records, 1.4 linear feet
http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8b56k9p

MS-F037, Jerome Tobis papers, 1.8 linear feet
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c89g5nfq

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.

Internship - Day 2.0

First Accession - ECOC

It's appropriate that my first UCI Special Collections and Archives (SC&A) accession on the records of the Environmental Coalition of Orange County (ECOC) coincides with the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a foundational document in modern environmentalism. In 1972, ten years after the publication of Silent Spring, the ECOC was formed by environmental activists to bring visibility to issues, concerns, and threats to the region's ecology. The ECOC communicated to its membership and the public by way of its newsletter, Environmental News.

A sister division within the UCI Libraries recently found a box of ECOC materials while cleaning out a long term storage area and passed it along to Special Collections. Because I expressed an interest in regional history (as opposed to University records), the collection was set aside by my supervisor as one of the collections for me to work on.

Documentation

One of the advantages of interning at UCI SC&A is the excellent documentation available on internal archival procedures. The document I'm using today is the Accessioning Manual for Archival and Manuscript Collections (AM). The Accessioning Manual is a 17-page accompaniment to the larger Archival Processing Manual (APM) and provides guidance for the initial handling of materials that come into the custody of  SC&A.

Accession Checklist

My work day started with filling out an online Archival Collection Accession Checklist that captures the output of work guided by the AM. Since I'm already comfortable with Archivists's Toolkit (AT), and my supervisor granted me access, I began inputting data into a new AT accession record while using the checklist to as a road map. As I made a quick pass through the unprocessed folders in the ECOC box, I made processing notes on the following areas to help me gather my thoughts about a processing plan and to ask questions of my supervisor :

• Principal names
• Separation candidates
• Restriction/destruction candidates
• Preservation/handling candidates

Paging from the Stacks

I knew I needed to develop a succinct description of the collection's provenance, which is why I asked my supervisor last week about paging copies of the ECOC's newsletter from a processed collection in the stacks. Even though it would have been easier to have one of the student assistants page the specific container, I asked to be shown how to do it myself. My supervisor cheerfully guided me through the steps of finding the container location in the online stacks database, and then walking me into the stacks to find the row, cabinet, shelf, and box. I filled out a paging flag to take the place of the paged box and hefted the box back to my desk. First retrieval accomplished! Later in the day when I had finished using the paged material, I returned the box to the stacks and put the paging flag in the tray to be tallied for reporting purposes.

Accession Record Review

Towards the end of the day, my supervisor and I got together to review my progress. My previously stated goal of having a processing plan ready for her review was not so much overly aggressive as it was inexperienced. I didn't have a processing plan yet, but I had accomplished inputting the accession record in AT. My supervisor made a suggestion on improving the accession description to make it conform to repository standards. She also provided guidance on filling out the access restrictions note. Other than that, I'm ready to move on to developing the processing plan next week.