Lately I've Had the Strangest Feeling...Archival Arrangement and Description

My dear cousin Nikki played the Jodeci rendition of Stevie Wonder's "Lately" at least ten times each Sunday  before church during the summer of 1993 when my little brother and I visited with our extended family in Choccolocco, Alabama. "Lately" is one of the songs that I belt out at the top of my lungs every time it comes on the radio. Those of you with healthy eardrums within a 50 foot radius of me and a radio can blame Nikki's unique praise and worship routine for the bells ringing inside your skull. The song begins, "Lately I've Had the Strangest Feeling". Lately I've had the strangest feeling about archival arrangement and description. Really. Arranging and describing the collection I've been assigned at the National Transportation Library has me feeling mighty strange about what is considered standard archival procedure.

Jodeci Understood Me

This week I worked with the two other archives interns to reformat the previous summer’s intern’s finding aid for the Dale Grinder Collection which required creating 38 new smaller finding aids which will ultimately be converted into pdf files and listed on the NTL historians webpage since the collection has not been digitized (it is only available in house) and government security policy prevents us from converting them to EAD using an OpenSource program such as Arcon. We have also reformatted the finding aids and are moving forward in processing the collection. I elected to process the 50 Secretary of Transportation Speech binders. These binders contain statements, addresses, testimony, nomination materials, and articles related to the tenure of Secretaries from 1967 to the present. Because of the work of previous interns these binders must be processed at the item level and entered manually into the access database created for the entire collection. Each document must be given a item unique number, folder number, description, year of creation, and Library of Congress Subject Headings. 

The biggest question facing the Archival Collections Intern team is one raised by Abigail Hoverstock and Rebecca Baird in their case study "Legacy in flight: processing the Marlon D. Green collection". Hoverstock and Baird know all about the Lately Blues, "As many questions resurfaced repeatedly throughout the process, it was also helpful that the students could work together to test their archiving “policies”. If they grouped “x” items in one way, should they apply the same principles to “y”?" The preliminary question we faced was "if the previous grouped items one way should we apply the same strategy when we KNOW that the current manner of arrangement and description is not in accordance with SAA standards". Processing documents at the item level is extremely time consuming and with the size of this collection we probably will not complete processing this summer. Most archives arrange items at the folder level. My team and I have just decided to go with established protocol and describe at the item level. The other day my mentor Mary gave me some much needed encouragement concerning work in the library field. She said something along the lines of "there will be projects that you work on for YEARS, but its the little ones you can see into completion that keep you sane and inspired to continue working." 

 So in the meantime my short-term, instant gratification project is cataloging Aerospace Medicine Technical Reports inside the NTL Digital Repository using Workroom cataloging software. I was assigned the task of editing punctuation in previously ingested records and adding report abstracts and report numbers into empty fields. I’m working to complete records from report years 1999-2009. Each year series has between 25 and 30 reports that require editing in Workroom. Some of the topics these reports cover are “Guidance for Medical Screening of Commercial Aerospace Passengers”, “Identification of Sildenafil (Viagra®) and Its Metabolite(UK 103,320) in Six Aviation Fatalities”, and “An Assessment of Commuting Risk Factors for Air Traffic Control Specialists” to name a few. I am glad that cataloging does not cause me as much angst as archival arrangement does. 

Nikki also played Tevin Campbell's "Can We Talk" a great deal. When I need a break from the access database, I get all googly eyed, log into WorkRoom, pull up an ingested record, and sing:

"Can we talk for a minute,

Girl I want to know you name,

Can we talk for a minute,

Girl I want to know your name.....oops I mean record number."