Week 4

1) What I have accomplished throughout the week:

Preservation
This week I learned how to do some basic paper repairs, mending tears in fragile paper and flattening edges that have curled with age. Using blotter paper, Japanese tissue paper, and P.h. neutral glue I was able to mend some of the pamphlets I have been stripping and cleaning. Many of these pamphlets have rips and tears as they are mostly from the 1930s and 40s and have not been stored in good conditions. I also made my first attempt at patching paper with holes, by gluing torn Japanese tissue paper over the effected area. As well, I continued my work searching donated journals for annotations.

Librarianship
I began the week by assisting the librarians with their annual book sale, in which many duplicates and unwanted materials are sold. I helped by organizing material by topic, and then worked during the sale itself. This was a great experience because I was able to interact with the many scientists who work at the museum and use the library facilities. Later in the week I shelved material for the first time, which helped me become more familiar with the library classification system. The Natural History Museum uses a system created by the founder of the library, and it is quite confusing and difficult to learn. Shelving really helped me become more familiar with the system. I also learned how to catalog ejournals this week. I have never done any cataloging work before, so this experience was especially useful. I was given a list of journals that are freely available online and added these into the library's system, Unicorn. Through this process I had to follow standard cataloging practices and language. This week I also continued my work on cataloging and describing the library's Challenger materials, and shadowed librarians at the inquiry desk.

Archiving
During my archive work I continued describing Nan Berger's papers. I went through my previous descriptions and made sure they were written according to International Archiving standards, and reorganized some folders to assure optimal accessibility. I also marked the format of each item in the archive, labeling items as typescript, manuscript, photograph, etc. I also learned how to catalog photographs and slides, both of which are included in Berger's archive. This process is a little more tricky because things like title, author, and date are not as obvious. As well, I organized both my descriptive spreadsheet and the files in the archive in chronological order.

2) What intersections I have seen between my job duties:

This week the lines between my three internships were much more defined. As I move further into each job, the duties do not cross as obviously. I am still doing some basic archiving work within my librarianship internship, as I continue to work on the Challenger project. As well, I am incorporating preservation into my archiving internship as I place items from the archive into melanex envelopes and mark items that need repair. A new similarity I have seen this week was between the cataloging activities at my librarianship and archiving internship. When describing items in the archive I have to use very specific, syandard language and phrases. The same is true when cataloging an item in a library. Being very conscious of small details is important for both of these tasks.