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.