S.T.D. in Archives

We are having fun today because I had Nick Cream working on a reference question about someone who received a honorary Doctorate of Sacred Theology in 1903. When asked what he was working on, he told his fellow workers he was researching a person that got an STD at Hobart in 1903. We had fun getting their reactions. 🙂

Senior student workers documenting student life

One of my senior student workers, Sarah Loomis, is carrying her camera everywhere with her for her last weeks at HWS, to document student life.  As she and another senior, Liz Staino, where talking about it they decided they should donate a copy to the Archives.  I said great, just get everyone’s name now.  Then Sara Greenleaf, head of Tech. Services got into the conversation and thought we should do some prints and use them in the display case for graduation.

On another note, I had a junior, Tiff Bennett, come up with the idea that we should have an Archives t-shirt.  Sophmore, Hayley Mason, came up with what it should say:

Where do I work?
In the library…
In the basement…
Past the Mummy…
In the cage..
HWS Archives.

Don’t we have fun!!

Soliciting materials for archives-2

I must say that the e-mail I sent out a month ago to have materials sent to archives has paid off, both in materials and awareness.  I’ve been hearing from several offices that I hadn’t before and my campus reference requests have increased.  There is always the problem of getting the extra work done, but it’s good for Archives!

Accessions import-glory

I only had to add 7 records that did not transfer.  I’m off to a workshop tomorrow, Friday off.  I’m so glad I won’t be think about this all weekend

Accessions import-Huzzah, Lee!!!

Lee ended up reworking my data and I was able to load more than half of it.  The other records were older and didn’t fit the scheme.  I’ll mess with those individually.

Here are some the things I was doing wrong:

• I had some memo fields, they have to be text fields
• Contact info seemed to be causing a problem, so I ended up leaving it out
• When I was exporting from MS Access I forgot to tell it to include the field names as the first record
• The data must be tab delimited with no text qualifiers

I hope this is helpful to others.  My best advice is, if you have any trouble contact the atug-l and Lee will help you out. 🙂

Accessions import

I tried a few more things with no success.  I posted my question on atug-l (Archivists Toolkit Users Group-list) and got a couple of suggestions which I tried.  This morning there was a posting from Lee Mandell, Design Team Manager, Archivists’ Toolkit, New York University asking me to send the file for him to look at.  Now that’s what I call support.  I’ll make sure to let you know what stupid thing I was doing. 🙂

Thank you Lee!

Importing-no glory

Ok, so of 230 records, 0 imported.  The error messages were about the accession number and date.

• I’ve gone and put a date in for each record.I don’t get what the problem with the numbers was.  I thought it said it would parse it out with the dot as delimiter.
• Second try it still didn’t take the dates.  I noticed the error message used “accession no” and “accession date” which is not what the table stated.  I’ve changed the field names to reflect the error message. Still no glory.
• Third try, the error message uses caps for the field names.  I can’t think what else to try. Still no glory.

Any ideas?  I need your help.  I’ve joined the AT list, perhaps they can help.  But you readers are not off the hook. 🙂

Importing accessions into AT

I’m working on importing my old accessions database that I had in MS access into Archivists Toolkit. So far I’ve changed all the old Accession numbers to match my new scheme and changed the the field names to match those on page 56-58 of Chapter 5 user’s manual. Next I’m going to do a query with just the fields that fit and export it as a text-delimited file. I’ll get back to you to let you know how it goes.

AT vs Backlog

OK, I just accessioned a pile of faculty publications and for those I decided to put in tracings for faculty and the faculty members name.

I am pleased with the Names database part of AT.  It will be my new authority file. It’s much easier to use than either the cataloging or searching modules.  As you type your keyword into the filter is just starts eliminating anything that doesn’t fit.

At this point, if it is a new name, I’m just putting in the name, knowing that I can go back and edit the name record easily when when I have time.

I like this!!

Archivists Toolkit vs the backlog

I got off to a pretty good start with the accessioning using priority numbers.  I think that part is going to work well.  However, I found myself getting all involved with determining subject headings and researching if we had other folders the item could be included with.  I finally realized I wasn’t  “working the backlog” I was well into description.

By the end of the day I decided that for the first step the only fields I will fill  are accession number, accession date, extent number, resource type and title.  If I have other information readily available, I’ll add it, otherwise I’ll plow through. 🙂

What are your experiences with this?