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 15.0

MS-R163 - Clippings on Development of Irvine (Calif.) and LAFCO

Internship - Day 14.0

MS-R162 - Orange County Human Relations Commission Records

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.

Internship - Day 9.0

FHCOC Reconsidered

FHCOC in the stacks.

At the end of the day last week, I asked my supervisor to review my AT resource record for the Fair Housing Council of Orange County (FHCOC) collection. As mentioned earlier, the collection does not have much variety in types of documents it contains, but is challenging in that the original order resembled the aftermath of 52-card pickup. But not to worry, the beauty of electronic finding aids is that original order can be maintained, yet the materials can be arranged intellectually for easy reference and easy retrieval.

First thing this morning, my supervisor shared her thoughts on the next steps for the FHCOC records. She made some excellent suggestions. This is the exact situation that makes an internship so valuable. I made my best effort at applying the archival theory I've learned from coursework and professional publications and then get to have it reviewed by an experienced archivist who gently makes excellent suggestions for improving the usefulness of the finding aid for research. Based on our discussion, I modified my series arrangement from:

• Court documents
• Regulatory documents
• Planning documents
• Newsletters

...to the following series and subseries...

• Legal documents
• Court documents
• Settlements
• Publications
• Regulatory documents
• Planning documents
• Newsletters

I was also reminded that DACS calls out for scope and content notes for "Each subsequent level of a multilevel description..." (3.1), so I added additional notes at the appropriate levels. We also determined it would be helpful to researchers if the folder labels were transcribed into AT. I generated a work ticket to delegate this task to a student assistant.

I concluded the day's tasks by labeling the document boxes, shelving them, updating the Stacks Locator, and updating the Accessioning Checklist and Processing Work Plan.

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.