For my internship at Loyola Notre Dame Library, I processed over forty different collections varying in size, subject matter, and dates. The oldest and smallest collection both happened to be the Adelia M. Hall diaries collection. This collection consisted of two small personal diaries from a female evangelical who traveled the world in the mid-nineteenth century. The diaries had small news clippings and letters held within the pages from her travels. This collection required a lot of preservation precautions as well as some translation and transcription work. The preservation precautions were to prevent further damage to the almost two century old leather binding of the diaries. I used gloves when handling the diaries and was extremely careful with each individual page in order to keep from ripping or bending the pages. Unfortunately, over the course of the travels and the years in storage, the diaries had seen much better days. The leather was beginning to crumble and the pages were extremely brittle. Much of the news clippings and some of the entries were in Spanish. Since I know an extremely small amount of Spanish, I had to work hard to transcribe the Spanish and then translate it to English in order to understand the subject matter of some of the entries and the news clippings.
The largest collection was the Notre Dame University Curriculum Committee records. This collection was the most frustrating and obnoxious collection I processed. Not only was it extremely large (roughly fourteen boxes if I remember correctly), but there was an immense number of duplicate materials scattered throughout the collection. I had to go through everything and separate the documents based on date and type (meeting minutes, proposals, finalized curriculum, etc.) and then go through each pile to weed out the duplicates and recycle any copies. The LNDL Archives policy was that items only needed a maximum of two copies in the collections (unless otherwise decided by the Head of the Archives, Jenny). The only reason we would keep more than two copies would be if there were valuable and varying notes taken on different copies and the notes were worth saving. Many of the items (specifically the meeting minutes) had dozens of unnecessary copies. We recycled A LOT of paper while I processed this collection. We also had a slight delay in the processing of this collection because of two reasons. The first being that the air conditioning in the building went out so we brought out the fans to cool us down and they immediately blew a few of my piles around and I had to redo a small section of the collection. The second (and most annoying) was that seemingly almost every other collection had a couple of items that needed to be moved to this collection. Even after I finished the collection, either myself or one of the other interns would find meeting minutes or proposals or something else that should have been a part of the Curriculum Committee records and I would have to dig out the boxes again and find where the items went (many of which we discovered were copies and just needed to be recycled). While my supervisor, Jenny, complimented me on my speediness and effectiveness of the processing of this collection, it felt like it would never end.
Lastly, the most interesting collection I processed was the Scrapbook Collection. It was composed of about a dozen different personal scrapbooks made by either students or faculty of the different universities. The scrapbooks were adorable and incredibly interesting to look at. The old photos and ephemera put in the books were so fun to go through. I really enjoyed this collection.
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