Internship at Skagit Valley College

Week 1 focused on establishing the project tasks and what we seek to accomplish during the interview. I met with the site supervisor and discussed the most pressing projects that needed to completed. Previous MLIS interns have worked on cataloging and organizing the archive but the collection as a whole does not have a cohesive taxonomy or call number system. We decided that this would be the most important aspect of the project and as long as time would allow we would also add on a digitization aspect as this is a concept and skill that I wish to learn and get experience in. Some collections within the archive that need digitization are the yearbooks, student newspapers, meeting minutes etc. Because the student newspaper collection is actively getting damaged in it’s current house we decided that this would be the best collection to digitize.

I do not yet have access to the colleges software system/network, I can’t access the digital catalog and see the current call number system for the digital materials. Therefore I decided to start with the inventory process. There are about 6 filing cabinets that house the materials without call numbers and a total of about 24 drawers that I will need to go through. The first drawer that I am tackling is titled “Campus Art” and houses materials related to the Washington State Arts Commission, the artists and the art pieces on the different Skagit Valley College campuses.

I started an excel spreadsheet to write my notes of the inventory. I used a word document for my last inventory project at the Lummi Island Historical Society archive and I wanted to try and use an excel spreadsheet to see if that would improve my ability to find materials that I have already inventoried and see the important metadata that I jotted down. I referenced the National Archives Series Inventory Form to determine what elements were important to note during the inventory process. The elements that I have chosen for my spreadsheet at this time are the drawer/location, Taxonomy name, Folder name, Date inventoried, Dates included, Description, Call number, Duplication, Condition, Notes. I recognize that these might not be all the elements that I keep during the entirety of the process but I think that these are the most important elements at this stage, however this can always change.

I was able to make it through about half of the drawer within 4 hours. I then moved on to begin organizing the student newspaper collection in chronological order and to get a scope of the collection. So far I have found newspapers ranging from 1932 to 1978. Not all volumes or years are present during my initial inventory and I don’t know if there are any other parts of this collection in other locations.

My site supervisor was able to supply me with a list of the current organizational taxonomy and I can see similarities of this taxonomy to the taxonomy that I created for the LIHS archive as well as differences. I will want to do some research into what schema this taxonomy follows, if it follows the LOC Thesaurus of Graphic Material like the taxonomy for the LIHS archive did.