Activist Archivist

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...