The Down and Dirty: The Physical Side of the Archival Process
Hollywood seems to portray the Archivist as this adventure seeking hero or heroine who runs a library or warehouse that is full of haunted or power filled artifacts. Oh, if only those newspapers I was placed in that buffered paper, and the acid-free box was a book of secret spells that would grant me three wishes.
In the real world of archiving, the only haunted archives are the boxes of stuck together photographs and mold infested documents from that forgotten basement. And honestly, this is where our adventure truly begins.
The setting up of the room is sometimes on an ongoing project. Organizing an archive is where surveying the various collections and donations is crucial so that the shelves can be arranged to house the multiple items. In this case, my mentor had already come up with a layout and thus devised a plan, a plan that leads to a day of cleaning, arranging, labeling, and going through boxes of donations and items that were saved from the ravishing waters of Hurricane Katrina. Thus I was handed a pad of sticky notes and a pencil, along with a cloth to dust off the many artifacts that I was going to place on empty shelves. The critical thing to remember is that this step can often be as important as the documentation of items. A clean and well-organized archive is crucial to the "health" of the archives that will be maintained and stored and should never be looked as grunt work that is less than significant.
