1) What I have accomplished throughout the week:
Preservation
I worked on cleaning books by washing, and also learned a technique to fix the corners of damaged items. As well, I looked through donated journals to determine if and where annotations existed. These journals were donated from a prominent English figure, and all notations needed to be found in order to preserve their content.
Librarianship
I began my work at the Natural History Museum this week. I received a tour of the many libraries, and was introduced to the very complicated organizational system. This system will take some time to learn as there are many sites containing books, and many collections with different numbering systems. I also shadowed members of staff working at the inquiry desk, learning the processes involved in assisting both museum scientists and members of the public in finding information located within the stacks. I also assisted my supervisor in pulling artwork from the rare books room, and arranging this material for an informative meeting. Also, I began pulling items from the general stacks relating to the Challenger expedition, as the museum is compiling a list of all these items in order to describe their contents. This description is especially important because some of the items included in the general stacks are manuscripts and primary materials, and the catalog does not yet provide details of their contents. My last task this week was to pull books from the Charles Darwin collection and remove the acidic paper bookmarks located within each book. I had to replace these bookmarks with conservation-grade paper bookmarks.
Archiving
During my archiving internship I began work on sorting through two boxes of materials, donated on behalf of Nan Berger. I was asked to go through these items, and create a detailed list of the items held in the boxes. The boxes included such things as correspondence, published articles, unpublished manuscripts, and slides. As well as creating a detailed list I began creating an organizational chart describing the original order of materials.
2) What intersections I have seen between my job duties:
I saw many intersections between my jobs this week. The documenting and sorting of Nan Berger's papers at the Women's Museum archiving internship was very similar to my work with the primary Challenger materials at the Natural History Museum during my librarianship internship. In both cases I was going through boxes of materials and describing what was contained. As well, during my librarianship internship I was removing acidic paper from books and replacing with neutral paper, which is relevant to my preservation internship. Many problems that are fixed during my time in preservation are due to the improper storage of books and materials. Also, during my preservation internship I was asked to look though journals for annotations in order to preserve the content. This was very similar to my archiving and librarianship work looking through notes and manuscripts.
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