Phase One: Cleaning and Identification

The collection that we have chosen for this project, as I've said, is a collection of family papers, consisting largely of letters and photographs, but also financial records, ephemera, awards and certificates, and a few artifacts (18 cubic feet total). Many of the materials were housed in a trunk, perhaps in an attic, are dirty, and have come in contact with what I am sure are a variety of rodents and vermin. We are starting the project by cleaning the documents and performing any preservation work that might be needed. We are also looking at the names of family members and other correspondants, trying to get a family tree in place. There will also be some preliminary sorting of materials. All of this before we decide on a processing plan.

One we have the processing plan in place , we will most likely also share the work of processing, or arranging, the materials. For now, we are cleaning the documents (with soft brushes) and developing strategies for flattening materials that have been rolled for over 60 years (we'll probably create a humidification chamberfor this...and don't worry, we'll tell you all about it).

We have already discovered fun and interesting things in the collection, as evidenced in the previous posts by Mat and Eva. I, personally, am a fan of the letterhead that we're finding (that's me up top, explaining my dream of an online exhbit consisting totally of letterhead from the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries). And we're finding gross and messy things, too, like desiccated bugs in the rolled documents. Such are the occupational hazards of being an archivist.

Traci