Week Eight and Nine

The past week and half has been low key, so I am just going to combine them.

I have been putting the finishing touches on my collections that I have done so far here, the Lecque Family Papers, the Humane and Friendly Society, and Prince Hall Chapter No. 41 Order of the Eastern Star. In addition, I created the finding aids for them using Notetab, overall the process has been easy (with a few frustrations).

On Wednesday, November 2^nd, Ms. Mayo and I led a workshop on what are archives, the benefits of them, what supplies are needed, online/virtual exhibits, and on LibraryThing, a personal library catalog for the Ravenel Caw Caw Interpretive Center. An employee there, Erica, who is the cultural interpreter formerly worked here at Avery and asked if we could come out and talk to her colleagues about the benefits of an archive for both the institution and for them. The Ravenel Caw Caw Interpretive Center, is both a nature and history interpretive center. The land that the Center is on “was once part of several rice plantations and home to enslaved Africans who applied their technology and skills in agriculture to carve the series of rice fields out of cypress swamps.” Unfortunately, we did not have time to tour the site, but hopefully before I leave I can go back there and do a tour and/or participate in one of their group activities. The workshop went really well and the staff was receptive to what we had to say and I think that they began to see the value in the need to document, preserve, arrange, and describe what they have their collection (books, papers, and artifacts). 

Read more here

Aaisha Haykal

IMLS Fellow

Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture