Internship at Skagit Valley College

Week 3 involved continued inventory, this week I was able to get through cabinets 3 and 4 and part of cabinet 5. The contents of these cabinets included Academic materials and publications from the college. There was a large collection of past drama production bulletins, yearbooks from 1938 to 2007, course catalogs from 1927 to 1991, quarterly course schedules, as well as miscellaneous other publications from the college. I was able to find more material in these cabinets that had call numbers already than I had previously seen. These gave me a good idea of the previous call number system and how it was applied to the material. I was able to tell that the sub-collections within the archive had a single call number. For instance all of the year books had a call number of 378.79772 CASCADI and then year number at the end, the yearbook from 1950 had the call number “378.79772 CASCADI 1950”. Interestingly not all of the individual yearbooks had a call number on them and then some years didn’t have a call number at all. This is a common theme throughout the collection, not all of the material has a call number applied but there is a standard that would make it easy to see what the call number would be for an item.

I know for certain that I want to do some more research into call numbers and the appropriate standards that should be applied before going ahead and making call numbers for each part of the archive. Because of this, I have not done too much work remotely using content dm and alma. My site supervisor did provide some insight into how these two software systems work together. We use content dm to create the digital record and then regularly these digital records are exported from content dm to alma where they are viewable by the users. I still feel hesitant to work on this aspect though because I wish to do more research and I want to get further along with the inventory to have a better idea of the scope of the archive.