Mental Health Association of Maryland Internship #2

Over the summer I worked at the Mental Health Association of Maryland (MHAMD) in the Lutherville-Timonium area. Once I settled into my office and archive as well as put up some signs about the archive, I assessed what I had in the archival collection. There were over 100 years of documents in the archive. There actually were a large amount missing from the office and were in the MD State Archives. The MHAMD became worried their documents would not be preserved for longevity or be easily accessible for researchers at the State Archives, so they decided to get their documents back, dozens of boxes worth. These boxes didn’t arrive until I finished my internship, so my focus was on organizing the documents currently within the archive. One of my first priority was to order proper preservation items to save the documents. They were stored in Office Depot plastic and not archival safe folders. I ordered a few hundred archival safe folders, archival safe plastic (for the fragile documents), archival safe hanging folders, and gloves to handle photographs with. Once I ordered all the documents my goal was to go through all the folders and determine what was inside. The typical set up was three folders for each subject, one would be stuffed to the brim of originals in office depot plastic, accompanied with 2-3 folders full of 2-3 scanned copies of each original document. All these copies took up an enormous amount of space and because of how stuffed they were near the originals, stated to warp and damage the original documents. I went through each folder, copy and original, and labeled each document in the folder. This took as while as there were many drawers of files. Next I went through all the folders I had labeled and further classified them as copies or originals. After this step I separated the copies from the originals in different drawers and went on to put each folder in chronological order. This was only the start of the massive organization of the archive. The attached image is what all the cabinets of archives looked like when I started, this photo however is just of copies of originals.