Course: HIST 635 – Internship in Archives
Internship: Art, Culture and Technology Archives and Special Collections at MIT
Week 8 Time: Thurs. 8/12, Sat. 8/14 – 12 hours
Total Time: 88 hours
So, this week I started migrating the Center for Advanced Visual Studies special collection finding aid from PDF form to ArchivesSpace. Holy moly! This is a big job. I haven’t had such a large AS task yet in any of my positions, so it feels like a big deal. The PDF is ninety-six pages long and covers 810 linear feet of materials. WOW! So I’ve spent twelve hours on it so far and I’m nowhere near halfway done. I’m going to keep plugging away! A lot of the work is almost meditative, and I’ve been solving puzzles and overcoming challenges to make AS work for the collection, so I’m really enjoying it! For a little while I was adding new agents to our AS database (there are dozens and dozens and dozens), but I decided to take a break from that so I could just focus on the inventory. Previously, I was struggling with how to do containers in AS, to make sure that both the intellectual arrangement and the physical arrangement are represented, and I finally figured it out! That felt like a great accomplishment. Now I’m pretty sure that I can fully and accurately represent the collection on the platform. We’ll see what problems arise, and I’m confident that with practice and research, I’ll be able to solve those too.
Kayla Allen 