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.

Tossing is Tough

I'm no advocate of Jenkinsonian methods and I know that archives cannot and should not keep everything. There is no conceivable way for an archive to keep everything even if they sought to do so. Nicholson Baker has an unrealistic mission for archives. See, all of this I know. All that aside though, it is really tough to toss things.

While going through the folklore archives I have accumulated a pile of materials that just don't belong in our archive for any conceivable reason. There is nothing unique about these materials and there is no recognizable tie to Indiana University or its faculty. Basically, these materials are just publications that a professor probably accumulated in their office. I really did try to find a home for these guys, but in the end they just need to be tossed. Discarding materials is so much harder in practice than in theory!