Week 8

1) What I have accomplished throughout the week:

Preservation
This week I completed my work with Craigie's journals by cleaning the volumes of grime and dust using a smoke sponge and a brush. This took sometime because the volumes were particularly dirty (which shows how improper storage can lead to quick degradation of the text block). I also continued my work on collection pamphlets, stripping, cleaning and sewing them.

Librarianship
This week I continued working on listing and cataloging the undocumented maps in the Oceanographic collection. There were issues while working on these, as I came upon many with missing titles and publication dates. I have not worked with maps before this experience, so I have learned a lot about how librarians catalog and research in this format.

I also organized a folder held within the museum library's archive which held correspondence between a librarian and a scientist in the 1970s. I arranged the letters in chronological order, removed any rusty metal (paper clips, pins, etc.), and created a detailed list of the contents of the folder. The description included the letters' sender and receiver, date, and format.

I also continued my work with the Challenger voyage collection. I removed items from the shelf that related to the voyage and listed what the volumes contained. There is a scientist visiting from France within the next few weeks who is focusing specifically on the Challenger voyage. The list I am compiling will help him find useful materials for his research.

Archiving
This week I completed the biographies of Nan Berger and Helen Joseph. These will be published on the Women's Library website this week. I also finished re-mounting old photographs of suffragists from the 1910s, and also re-packaged them in melanex folders held in a binder. I finished re-packaging the Miss Great Britain photographs and also put these in melanex folders and organized them into folders. Next week I will begin listing the contents of the photos.

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

This week I worked with some museum archive content during my librarianship internship, performing many of the same tasks with that material as I do during my archiving internship (like stripping material of rusty metal, organizing according to original order, and creating a detailed list of contents). As well, I was instructed to follow preservation guidelines when re-packaging the material in the Miss Great Britian archive.