Mental Health Association of Maryland Internship #3

Over the summer I continued my work organizing the archive at the Mental Health Association of Maryland (MHAMD). As MHAMD is a non-profit which does amazing work, archival preservation is not their forte. After I assessed the collection and organized items from copies and originals and chronologically, the next step, which would be brutal, was to match the copies with  the originals so I could begin to get rid of the hundred upon hundreds of copies. I had to grab an original folder and find its copy, which there could sometimes be up to four copies of, and meticulously match each original document with it copy. Once I confirmed that there was an original of the copy I could finally deaccession all the copies. I spent weeks on this part and in the end I had two piles a foot and a half tall each that had to weigh at least eight pounds. There were a few copies that I could not find the originals of so I stored them in a safe place. After dealing with the copies I could finally give the originals the time they deserved. I further organized them in chronological order and removed all the Office Depot plastic from them. I then placed the fragile documents into archival safe plastic and moved all the documents into archival safe folders. I gave each folder a title which could be easily organized and also on the front of each folder I wrote every document inside of it. It was certainly tedious work but it needed to be done to ensure the longevity of the archive. After weeks of this work I further organized the documents chronologically and placed them into archival safe hanging folders. The CEO wanted all the documents to be easy to access chronologically. We also talked about digitizing and finding ways to make the collection even more accessible to people. The MHAMD also took back dozens of boxes of their archives from the  MD state archives. My time was up in the summer before I had the chance to get to this, but they have offered me the opportunity to come back whenever I was able to continue working on the collection. Although I may not be an archival professional, I felt like I really made a difference to help preserve the documents of such an important organization. I handled well over a hundred documents dating from 1915 to 2016. The picture is how I left the collection after I organized it. Also it shows the difference from start to end.