Internship at Skagit Valley College

This week I continued the inventory process, I was able to complete cabinets 5 and 6 and start on cabinet 7. I am starting to feel like I have a good idea of the contents and scope of the archive. The materials that I sorted through this week included Events & Historical Accounts, Manuals/Policies/Procedures, General Education, Commencements, Photos, and other misc. Media.

I feel like I have a better idea of the type of materials that can be transferred to the state archive as well as what material should be de-accessioned completely. For instance I found a cardboard bound newsletter that was not produced by SVC and is about Senator McCarthy from 1945, I am confident that this does not need to be a part of this collection and should be de-accessioned. I also saw several duplicates and copies of research and studies that SVC performed and generated for their General Education Program, the fact that these were not necessarily repeated and seem to be a “special” activity that is not annual then I feel that the duplicates/copies can be transferred to the state archive.

I also started research into Call Numbers, Accession Numbers, and Reference Codes. I could not find much material that provides archivists with best practices and guidelines for creating call numbers, there is more material on creating Accession Numbers and Reference Codes. These identifiers are pertinent and related to the activity that I am engaging in. I am using materials like “Describing Archives: A Content Standard” from the Society of American Archivists as well as some examples on the SAA website under their section for Call Numbers. One example is the J. Paul Getty Trust Institutional Archives Accessioning Manual which was revised by Lorain Wang in August 2023. This manual has a section describing how they use Accession Numbers in their call numbers, their formula looks like: [Accession number]-[box number]. An example from the manual looks like 2005.IA.01-01 and 2005.IA.01-02. The issue with this example is that I do not have access to accession numbers for our materials.

I also examined the work that has been done by previous MLIS students in the SVC archive, one student digitized and organized the Board of Trustees material. During this process they created call numbers that looked like: BOT Minutes 1961-1962 Box# 001. Though I do not have the boxes and their call numbers in front of me so I do not have access to the physical call numbers. The issue that I am running into with this schema is that the rest of the archive is in drawers in filing cabinets and not boxes. What this means is that if I used this schema then the call numbers would look like BOT Minutes 1961-1962 C1D2 or BOT Minutes 1961-1962 012.

I had another idea that we could assign a 0000 number to each macro-category on the Taxonomy Hierarchy list and then add on the sub-categories. An example would be to assign the macro-category “Publications” a 0600 number. The sub categories might be Newsletters and then the specific Newsletter. The resulting call number would look something like 0600NEWSL.Patchwork 2006. This would be a long call number and might be too detailed for what the archive is working with. this would also mean that they would have to change the current call numbers for the material that has already been organized and assigned a call number.

I have been referencing the current taxonomy hierarchy list and I am wondering if I use this list to create the call numbers, though this hierarchy can be more detailed than I can succinctly fit in a call number. I will need to discuss this with my site supervisor in order to figure out what the institution thinks is best. I need to know how detailed I should get and if the call number should be based off of current physical location or location in reference to other materials. This is important to keep in mind since my site supervisor was hones that they are planning on re-modelling the library and they will need to move the archival material around several times. Call numbers based off of current physical location won’t be helpful during or after the re-modelling process, unless they are very committed to keeping the archives in the same order.