Internship at Skagit Valley College

This week entailed finishing the re-organization of the archive according to the new taxonomy. This week I finished with the administration services section and moved on to the student services section. I was able to finish this process by the end of week 6. Now all of the material is organized alphabetically by the over-arching categories, Board of Trustees, Academic Services, Administration Services, and Student Services. The Board of Trustees collection was already organized and cataloged by a previous intern, so I was able to get the last three categories organized and prepared for cataloging and digitization. The rest of the project that I will be focusing on is the Student Services collection so that is what I wanted to ensure is properly organized. I believe that the other 2 categories might need further organization as I was not able to devote too much time to them. I believe that it will be helpful as well for future workers to go through and adjust their organization as it will give the archiver/cataloger the proper scope of those two categories.

By the end of the organization process I had collected two boxes of material that I am setting aside as I believe they will be useful/interesting to the coordinators of the colleges 100th anniversary celebration. This included some library scrapbooks, an old professors personal journal/scrapbook that included some very interesting personal and professional material, annual bulletins from the 1930’s, and yearbooks dating back to the 1940’s just to name a few. There is also a box set aside with material that I am either not sure if it fits within the scope of the archive, i.e. it doesn’t pertain to the college, or is material that I am unsure of its placement within the archive. These are materials that I would like to either have the site supervisor go through or have their help and we can go through it together. There is also a box of material from the Whidbey campus that showed up 2-3 weeks into my internship and I have not gone through as I am unsure where it will fit and I do not want to disrupt the items provenance by splitting it up without first documenting somewhere where the material come from.

Next week we will be starting the scanning and digitizing process. The library has a snap scanner that we will use to scan the material which we will then upload to content dm. The library then regularly and automatically uploads material from content dm to Alma which is the software system users use to search and find materials that they library owns or has access to. I should not need to use alma too much. Though this week I did also perform a small side project with content dm.

One of the librarians had found some copies of “Crosscurrents” which was a publication from the Washington Community and Technical Colleges Humanities Association. This was a publication featuring prose, poetry, essays and artwork by different faculty members from participating community and technical colleges. We had found that some of these materials were in alma and some were not, some had bar codes and some did not. The library will keep copies of “Crosscurrents” in the stacks and then once they age out they will then be transferred to the archive. I went through the copies in the archives, ensured that they had barcodes and then updated their catalog information and metadata in Alma for the archives holdings. I was also able to make their call numbers using the new system that we had devised. There had been 3 copies of Crosscurrents that weren’t in the system at all and I was able to ensure their findability as well as practice using cataloging software.