An
internship with UMBC Special Collections: the Lawrence Watt – Evans Project
An unfortunate update for the Albin O. Kuhn internship with
Special Collections. With the school and library shut down, I am not permitted
to rejoin my colleagues and continue with the Lawrence Watt-Evans collection.
While preparations are being made to hopefully give interns a change to help
with their projects from home, for now, I will not be able to continue with the
collection. So far, I had almost finished Series II of his collection which
included most of his convention materials including items either from
conventions where he was asked to run a panel, appear as a special guest, or
regular conventions he attended on his own time. Some conventions had much more
materials from over the years – Balticon and Norseacon were the two biggest and
would have had boxes of their own – with others only having one or two pieces,
usually just an informational packet or pamphlet. One of the very interesting
things I found was actually accidentally mixed in with the convention items, but
was a personal letter from one of the directors for a convention, handwriting a
letter to Watt-Evans about how honored he would be to have him be on their
panel since he read his books as a child.
I
couldn’t get past Series II before moving on, but this series meant organizing
all the different conventions together and putting them in alphabetical order
within their respective conventions. Then I went through each convention and
put those in chronological order, and moved them into acid free folders, and
put them all back in alphabetical order in their boxes. It sounds a bit boring,
but it was actually very rewarding to put everything back in its place, and I
got to read some amazing convention materials. In my previous post, I also
mentioned how when I thought I was done, we found another whole box of
materials I had to sort in with the already organized materials. All it took
was about 5 minutes into that box to help me realize how crucial it is to
properly label and store all materials so when others come behind to organize
it, they have the entire collection and don’t have to spend more time
merging the two together. Organization is key in libraries and special
collections, especially when working with larger collections.
I
would have loved to move onto the next series, since I was so close, because
the next series was the proper format used by libraries and special collections
for labeling and storing their materials. Particularly exciting to me was the
opportunity to use our UMBC Special Collections numbering system. We used a
more traditional manuscript collection database and applied archival standards
like DACS (Describing Archives a Content Standard). This is used by major
historical institutes across the country, so I was excited to be able to take
something to a new job in the future and already have some background
information about specialized organization. Though the opportunity did not
arise, after arranging a collection, I would have helped making a finding aid,
then passing it on to catalogers who make a collection level record using MARC
and moving into Worldcat and our Library catalog. I was also looking forward to
looking at the included aspects of the Watt-Evans project, such as his personal
correspondences, writing drafts, manuscripts, and more! I had planned to read a
few of his books to better understand his drafts and pre-published materials so
that I could fully grasp the meaning of his writing items. I am upset that I
will not get to continue and finish this project, but there was nothing about
it so far that I did not like. It was fun, taught me the importance of proper
organization and delegation of time to sorting and dating materials, as well as
storing key project pieces in an orderly and easily accessed fashion.
