Week 7 Wrap Up

So I finally got the folklore archives (at least the portions given to me) in a working order. At the end I have 3 new record series and 1 new manuscript series. Two boxes of student papers were also organized and inventoried. Homeless and/or lost files found homes and a sense of relevance. The tough part was discarding some materials. I know that they did not belong in the archive, but it is still difficult to toss items. I hope that making the decision to not keep materials gets easier as my internship progresses, because at the moment it still feels like a failure to not find a proper home for those items.

Next week I will be spending time creating finding aids for these 4 new series and awaiting my next assignment. I hope I get to answer some reference questions, as that is one of my favorite tasks. Here is a list of the new record series' created this week:

Folklore Student Association

Folklore Department Administrative Records

The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife 1987

Pauline Montgomery: Grave Monuments (manuscript series)

Also, the Dorson collection was cataloged this week and the finding aid is being encoded in EAD. Hopefully the collection and finding aid will be available for research very soon.