Week 8 Day 15 & 16 (July 1 and 2)

Sorry (for like the millionth time) for the late update. So as to be expected if I plan anything for the week something will come up and all of my plans have to get rearranged. This week was no exception. However the change of plans was nothing extreme.

On Tuesday, Christine and I went over the plan of accessioning items and then creating a finding aid. About an hour into the day we realized maybe this isn't the best use of our time. Change of plans we decided it would be better if we just got straight to the finding aid first and accession everything later. Creating the finding aid honestly felt much less frustrating for the moment and I honestly don't mind that we did things backwards. By the way that is one of the things I like the most as far as working with Christine and this internship in general. Sometimes you get to make your own rules. It can be quite refreshing and makes you feel like you have some type of control over this giant process.  

This finding aid is something completely new to the both of us so I was basically learning as I went and after playing around with the idea of it all for a bit I created a format that would work best for the way documents and boxes have been set up both in the collection and in the museum itself. In order to meet the deadline for the schedule Christine created, I had to quickly set up this finding aid and I have to finish it by next Wednesday which includes all of the founding families and the Maitland minutes. 

Not gonna lie it took me all of Tuesday just to do one box (which included two families) and I was worried since I had to do at least 6 or more boxes within the next three days. Thankfully after the first day I felt confident enough on Wednesday as to how the finding aid was looking and everything I had already included in it. At that point I was able to do four more boxes and give a detailed description of what materials were enclosed in the box. 

If I continue at this rate I should be totally done by Wednesday and the finding aid will be a 100% completed when I take it home and add a biographical narrative for each family throughout the end of next week. 

Hopefully everything goes as smoothly next week as it did this week. 

Hope everyone is having a great July 4th weekend.

-Ambar the History Student