What I'm doing

Hmm, perhaps I put the cart before the horse, and should have made this the first post.

Much of this is in my profile, but I'll elaborate here.

I work at a large community college. I am in charge of a satelite campus library as well as the college archives. During the semester, I work at the campus library three days a week and the main library (where the archives is) two. Any breaks sends me to the main library.

My library is windowless, save the windows to my office I rarely use, the storage room, and the hallway. I've tried my best to decorate it and probably spent too much money doing it, but hey, I have to work here. Everyone likes my greatest invention of a poster of an outdoor scene with curtains around it to make it look like a window. It's an idea I had when thinking of how to decorate an apartment which only has windows on one wall.

Technically, I'm a reference librarian. Here's a range to get an idea of the questions I face (not word for word):

"I want to type something like a letter. Do I use Wordzzz for that?"

I'm assuming she meant a software program and not constructions of consonants and vowels.

"Is the printer set up for Blue Tooth?"

At the time, I had only a vague idea of what Blue Tooth was, but I was pretty sure our printer didn't qualify.

The archives is the biggest challenge. There's really no nice way to describe it, so I'll try to be vague. The organization is not to archival standards. In fact, materials have been taken out of their original order and filed in sporatic subject groups. I've gone through all the boxes and created a basic accession list. (Really, I was trying to get an idea of the kinds of materials so I'd have in mind where to put things as I created an organization structure.) I've given up trying to put things back in their original order. It would take too much time and I don't have enough provenance records to get everything back where it should. Instead, I am trying to reorder that list to some obvious, intuitive organization. To be transparent, I took a cue from Wake Forest University's archives and adapted their structure to my college. To make a long story short, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Finally, I'm not sure why I'm creating a blog. I'm not the type to advertise myself and I'm not the strong opinion type. My biggest fear is this blog will be reduced to a place to vent frustrations and otherwise show my failings. More likely it will die a slow death.

Scrapbooks

I'm interupting my development of an organizational structure for the archives and am working on a scrapbook. Two mini-problems have reared their head.

First, I noticed the scanner I was given cuts off the sides of photos and sometimes magazine articles. What's a bare bones archivist to do? Take a page from Hollywood. I'm using blue posterboard and a green file folder (colors chosen because that's what I had) as a frame for the photo or article, thereby tricking the scanner to scan the whole item. Of course, this means going back and editing out the frame, but I haven't thought of a better solution. And yes, recording all the changes I make to the image...

Second, I realized that I have a lot of the magazines/newsletters/etc. the articles came from. I wonder if it's kosher to just take apart one of the many copies I have in the archives instead of scanning them. Take less time and effort, to be sure, but I'd still need a digital copy if I ever put it online. Not to mention retaining the integrity of the scrapbook.