A funny thing happened and I’m in a different world!

My position was recently re-evaluated, because it was realized that I didn’t really fit under any current policies. I went from a 12 month appointment where I worked 940 hours per year, with full benefits except vacation, personal days and sick leave…to a 10 month appointment where I work 930 hours per year, with full benefits. Since I have two months off in the summer, no vacation or personal days. This is all at the same pay rate, so I don’t lose anything.

This happened two days before before I left for “vacation.” I had asked for a week and a half, it was actually comp time, but was told to take 2 and a half weeks, to use all of the comp time. The new contract will start July 1st, so I’ll work the month of June, then be off from July 1st until August 15th.

Now anyone in their right mind would say whoopee!! But not being in my right mind, I was thrown completely off balance. I haven’t had this much time off since around 1978, and I’m not that all that great at using time off well. I’ve been keeping busy and using my time fairly well, but still spend a lot of time thinking about work. Perhaps if I write down what I need to do when I get back, I’ll be able stop running it over in my mind constantly.

• Get the Vail photos up on CONTENTdm.
• Figure out how to set up a new finding aid style sheet in Archivist’s Toolkit.
• Inventory the vault.
• Work on a BI for Primary Resources using ideas I’ve been picking up from the book “Made to Stick”.
• Get a list going of projects for student workers in the fall.
• Set up staff training for care of rare books an archives in the event of water or other damage due to an emergency.

I’ll probably be adding to this when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t sleep, because I’m thinking about work. That may be more than I can do in the month of June anyway. I’ll start working on my August list.

Archivist’s Toolkit 1.5.9

We just did the AT update.  I’m very happy with the search function now.  Before I didn’t see how to search for a word in a title.  Now it’s great. I love that it drills down into the components.

They say that one of the new features is improved stylesheets.  I don’t see any links to the stylesheets and the new features documentation doesn’t cover it so I’m in the dark.

I took a shot at tweaking the old stylesheet, a while back, without success.  Good project for the summer I guess.

Authority files

I don’t know if any of you have run into the same situation with authorities that I have…

The  archives was originally setup  with item cataloging.  All  folders  are items in the card catalog.   I estimate  at best  20% of the  card catalog has  be converted to  MARC  and in our Voyager catalog. Since I came I’ve been item cataloging the digitized photographs.

Once Archivist’s Toolkit showed up on the scene, I’ve been trying to do incoming materials as collections.  Also, pulling some of the existing “items” together into subject collections for ease of use.

Now the names and subjects headings that are in the Voyager catalog are not in the AT names and subjects and visa versa.  I want to be as precise with our local names and subjects as p0ssible.  Here is my plan:

• I have Pauline, a super precise cataloger in our Tech Services, working with me.
• Pauline is checking the names and subjects I have already put in AT for correctness. (I’m not a cataloger by training.)
• She is then going through Voyager and checking that the headings conform to AT.
• I’m using AT as THE authority file.  As I’m cataloging more photos or adding collections, I check the AT headings.  If a heading isn’t there, I add one.
• I’m keeping track of my additions to send to Pauline, so she can check for correctness.  I’m hoping this way new things won’t slip through the cracks, as she moves alphabetically down the list.

I hope I’m not making both Pauline’s and my life too complicated. It just seems there are so many possibilities for forms of all those faculty and alum names that without an authority file we might loose someone.

Finding Aids from Archivist’s Toolkit.

OK, I know a lot of you are quicker on the uptake than I am, but I’ve fused over doing finding aids with the data from Archivist’s Toolkit for months. I would try, get the data with no formating, try something else, no joy, wait a few weeks than start all over again.

“It’s all happened before, and it will all happen again.” BSG

I was:

• using the AT export EAD button
• taking the file to Notebook with the EAD Cookbook
• doing parse and validate
• doing make HTML

Makes sense, that was how I had done finding aids by hand.

Guess what! Finding Aid is a report under Resources in AT! Talk about making things harder than they need to be.

I did need some help with one change. The title of the finding aid was showing up as the ID number. I posted my question on atug-L yesterday and found it answered this morning. Thank you, Winona Salesky of UVM!!

If this helps anyone see the light sooner than I did…HUZZAH.

[Points for me, I remembered to update my Procedures Wiki with the new information. ]

Dime Novel Finding Aid complete

It has been a long hall on the Joseph J. Myler Collection of Half Dime Novels, but it is finally complete. The listing started in MS Access, moved and was finished in Archivists Toolkit. The finding aid was exported from AT, and cleaned-up in Note Tab using EAD Cookbook clips. It makes me think we have come a long way since we started receiving this donation.

Take a look: http://academic.hws.edu/library/archives/dime.asp

The next step with my finding aids is to do something about the colors. Perhaps I need to move to another school to do it though.

Cleaning up

The push for spring in the whole library is to clean out anything that is just taking up space.  It looks like Archives is the only thing that isn’t going to be moved this summer for the construction of the Learning Center on the 1st floor.

My bit has been to clean out the “vault”, which you couldn’t work through.  Since, in the fall the Rare Book Room is going to become part of Archives, we’ve moved some of the visually interesting items to the locked, glass cabinets in there.

There were also two shelves full of framed items.  I think most were in the vault only because there was no other place to put them.  I’ve divided them into those that would go well hung in the Rare Book Room and  those that can be “deframed”, foldered, and stored in the flat file.  Student worker Hayley Mason, has taken on the “deframing” project and is doing a great job with it.

The big clean up for me is to go through the “piles” that have built up again.  Once I get them in accessions in Archivist’s Toolkit, and they have a number on them, I can stick them in cold storage and know they won’t be lost.  Any yet, they are out of my way.

I’m still working on how to make my PDFs created from email, valid PDF/A’s.  Always looking for ideas.

Great suggestions

Thanks for all the great suggestions on tracking what people have used on past visits to the archives.  If you haven’t seen them check out the comments on my last post.

I think I’m going to put together some combo of the suggestions.   I’m going to want it to be on the computer though.  We need to get them to add a database for Clients to Archivists Toolkit.  Then we could link to the collections used.

It is so wonderful to send a question out into the void and actually get answers!!

Student workers on Archivist Toolkit

I now have ten student workers trained and inputting data on Archivists Toolkit.  We are flying through the Half-Dime Novels that our donor started sending with the beginning of the new tax year.  Viva AT, Viva Student Workers.

Faculty Files Finished

As the semester ends we just finished all 13 boxes of faculty files that came to us from Communications at the beginning.  They are all processed and entered into Archivists Toolkit.  It has been great to have that networked so my students could input the data as they went.  Of course I still need to fill in the rest of the information.

I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the time to do subject tracing on each faculty member, or if time wise in makes more sense to depend on Ctrl-F to find a name in the Finding Aid.  If I decide to do it “right” the finding aid may never get finished.  Ponder, ponder.

A big thanks to my studentworkers for a very long job, well done.  Julius Ferraro and Pete Murphy will graduating at the end of term, so huzzah to them both.  Also working on this project were Tiffany Bennett, Kate Schuster, Roger Arnold and Betsy Dingman.  We would never get anywhere with out their help!!

Social Networking

Today the Irreverent Archivist was talking about social networking (http://irreverentarchivist.blogspot.com/2007/11/is-this-21st-century.html) and I wanted to put in my 2 cents.

I’ve been experimenting with Facebook.com. It has proven to be a great way to relate to my student workers and colleagues here at the library and within the region.  I admit we are using it to exchange pictures, book and movie recommendations and challege each other to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” trivia contests.  But I believe it could easily be used to exchange information on a professional level as well.  If you are interested in trying it out you can ask to me my friend (Linda Clark Benedict).  I’d love to “meet” you.

The other tool I’m experimenting with is instant messaging.  I’ve signed up with Meebo.com which will read messages from other applications.  (Yahoo, AOL, Jabber…) You have to know people’s addresses to add them to your contacts.  I’ve added a couple of archivists in my region, but often they forget to login.  A couple of days ago I was IMing with an archivist who is 1.5 hrs drive from here, to try and troubleshoot a problem she was having with Archivists Toolkit.  We didn’t fix the problem, but at least we defined it.