Big news!

Yesterday, I finished creating a finding aid for the Congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph. We are 98% done with the collection - I just need to put stickers on the nicely organized boxes and we'll be good to go. This is all very exciting, of course. One of my supervisors did an algorithm that revealed that she averages 6.5 hours per linear foot of information, though she took 8.5 hours on the Sr. Helen project. I think I took about 9.5 hours per linear foot, so for a totally new, untrained archivist...not as well as I'd like, but also not so bad.

So: done with the CSJs, mostly.

That means, on to Don Mullan! He is clearly a super interesting dude, but I can't make heads nor tails of the collection thus far. The first box contained binders: the various testimonies of Soldier 027 (with notes taken on an entire pad of post-it notes), a collection of photographs (some with Sr. Helen Prejean...I can't escape her!), and travel information with awards and pamphlets and letters. It's a lot to take in. Thankfully, I only have to do a container list this time instead of processing the entire thing. It's his life's work and I'd like to do it justice, but I simply can't in four months.

Here are some photos that I've taken so far:

I discovered this at the very end of processing the CSJs' stuff. This is some more of Sr. Helen's artwork.

And here is how nice and neat I got everything: 

This was the first thing I looked at in the Don Mullan collection...I knew that this was going to be a rough one. (He's got lovely but unreadable handwriting, he's dyslexic, and I swear bits of it are in Gaelic. It is a challenge!)

Some fun pictures that I found - I have no clue who these people are. Are these personal photos of Don's? Or are these collected photos of victims of the Bloody Sunday massacre? Or are they of the perpetrators? Conveniently, they appear to be unlabeled - or I can't decipher the label...

(I can't figure out how to rotate this one, sorry, but you get the point.)

You know you're a bigshot when you have multiple of these in your binders:

That's all for this week. Hopefully next week will be less daunting.

Not much to report this week, unfortunately.

I'm at the very end of organizing the CSJ collection:

I actually spent five hours copying files yesterday - there are newspaper articles dating back to the 70s. That kind of paper disintegrates - so there's no reason for us to hold on to it. That is weird for me. I don't come from a museum background, or anything, but getting rid of originals was difficult. I held on to them until the last minute - but then I managed to fill a recycling bin twice! (And use almost an entire ream of paper for copies.)

Almost done...then I get to write a finding aid!

Week two and everything is going well! I'm almost done with organizing two of the boxes of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph. That means I've read through everything (and I mean everything) that was in the three boxes. The first box, I handwrote every thing that was in it - so, for instance, I would write the year that the item was published or written (or n.d., if I couldn't figure it out) and then the relevant topic - say, opera, or press, or correspondence. The second box, I color coded with post-it notes.

It's a good thing that I'm not being paid, because I've been using my weight in post-it notes. This method worked, to an extent - I kept running out of colors and eventually wound up handwriting on post-its. 

This is what I wound up with: 

 My favorite things to come across are sweet handwritten notes - this one was interesting...

I've also found some good stuff from early in Sr. Helen's life - like when she moved in to the projects shortly after Vatican II, teaching affluent students what it was like to be poor and conducting a literacy program for her neighbors. I also found poetry that was written by Sr. Helen before Vatican II, when she was Sr. Louis!

And, since I love theology (and my mom is a chaplain who does lots of end-of-life stuff), this was pretty fascinating: 

This is what my work station looks like, usually - the chaos is organized, I swear!

And finally, my massive pile of sticky notes when I was done refoldering the first box in to a coherent pattern.

It's a good thing Sr. Helen is so sweet. She's got a tremendous heart - it's all visible in this stuff - and a fantastic sense of humor. It's strange to feel like I know this woman who I've never met, and might even have handled things about her early life that she doesn't even remember!

All that said, there are side effects to handling this much paper: my hands are very dry all the time. I need to invest in some moisturizer. 

'Til next time, Internet!

Hey y'all,

I started my internship on Tuesday of this week and, well, it hasn't exactly been what I had expected.

I've done some work in the past in archives, but always from the perspective of the researcher. Doing that is a totally different experience, though.

Before, I was accessing the material with the specific purpose of answering my research question. Now, though, I have to read everything, which means that I can skim a lot less.

Or, I'm told, I can skim more - I am, after all, only supposed to categorize the files in to vague-but-accurate categories. But! Some of this material is so interesting!

So: I'm working at the moment with the archives donated by the Congregation of the St. Joseph (heretofore referred to as CSJ). There's only three boxes; it's kind of a smaller project to start on, which is nice. The reason why we have their files, despite the fact that they're based out of New Orleans, is because we have been donated the files of Sr. Helen Prejean, a prominent anti-death penalty activist and victims-rights activist. You may have heard of her: Susan Sarandon portrayed her in an adaptation of her best-selling memoir, Dead Man Walking. And Sr. Helen's congregation is CSJ.

All or most of the files that we've been given portray directly (or indirectly, I suppose) to the work of Sr. Helen. That means lots of correspondence between the congregation and Sr. Helen, when she's on the road, and also includes things like contract negotiations (for books, movies, TV films, etc) and lots of newspaper clippings about Sr. Helen's ministry.

This is what my work has looked like:

And also, check it out! The key to the city of Cincinnati!

It's been good - it's been surprisingly tiring, though. It's very immersive work, which means that I open a folder and then look up three folders later and it's been two hours and I'm exhausted. I'm glad I'm only doing five hours a day - It's tiring work! I wasn't expecting that, especially because I've always been a fairly competent reader.

One note: I have been trying to figure out the legal intricacies of posting personal information from the archives. It is a matter of public record, yes, but I want to make sure that all's squared away. Also, pictures! Depaul has some rules regarding who can take pictures and publish them. (I figure these are okay. Please don't sue me.)

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

Welcome! Here's where I'll document my experiences as an archivist in training at depaul university in Chicago. I start tomorrow, so expect some posts and some actual content later this week. I'm excited!