Week 29 at The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

Last week, I was given the honor of accepting an award on behalf of The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum.  The award was posthumously presented to Dr. Mayme Agnew Clayton for being a champion of Black History & Museum Founder. The event, hosted by The Museum of African American Art, focused on African American women in honor of  Women's History Month.

The next day, MCLM hosted a disaster preparedness workshop.  This type of workshop occurs in many locations and is funded through a NEH grant. Westpas, a preservation assistance service, is the grant writing agency.  The event opened my eyes to the amount of planning that must go into preparing for a disaster, especially earthquakes. 

On the collections side of events from last week,  I have assigned a group of volunteers to inventory the entirety of the James Jeffery,  Jr. collection. James Jeffery's Jr. was a Southern California based artist, he also served on the advisory board of The Western States Black Research Center.  This collection consists of photographs, prints, and some mixed media paintings. Once the inventory is complete it will be pushed into the database.     

Alyss Hardin
IMLS Fellow, MLIS
The Mayme A. Clayton Libray & Museum

Week Twenty-Nine at the Maryland State Archives

I continued working on case studies of Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS) emigrants. I discovered that Stepney Harper, the father of an emigrant family, encountered financial difficulties in 1829, forcing him to sell all of his property to pay creditors. This may have been one of the impetuses to encourage the Harpers to settle in Liberia in 1832.  After he purchased himself, his wife, and one of his sons, it’s hardly surprising that he found himself in debt. Sadly, of the four Harpers who emigrated, only Stepney’s son Lafayette was still living by 1843. The amount of documentation that I can uncover on the MSCS emigrants varies widely, but it is satisfying to be able to flesh out their stories whenever I can.

I also attended a couple of programs last week. The most interesting one was a lecture on the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park held at the Annapolis Maritime Museum. National Park Service (NPS) historian and manager, Barbara Tagger gave a wonderful presentation about Harriet Tubman and the ways in which the natural landscape can teach us about her life. I also had a chance to meet Barbara Tagger and talk to her about other NPS projects that she has worked on, including the Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth home in Atlanta. The Annapolis Maritime Museum is a hidden treasure that interprets the Chesapeake Bay, a waterway that has been central to the livelihoods and political importance of Annapolitans, including the African American community.

Krystal

March 19 - 23, 2012 at Fisk University

This week I continued to work on the Smith collection, specifically the correspondence from the 1940s. As you can imagine, Smith being a Director of the Rosenwald Fund as well as Director to other school programs, there is a large portion of correspondence....1000s. I managed to process up to 1943, which I will continue with on Monday. I plan to start working on correspondence from the 1950s next week too. Also this week, I began to work on my materials for the National Rosenwald School conference this coming June. I will present on a panel discussion concerning HBCU archives as well as a poster session documenting the S.L. Smith collection at Fisk University. I look forward to listening to Nikki Giovanni as he keynote speaker and perhaps meeting her afterwards.

Week 28 at The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

Last week marked the final training session for the new OPAC. There were about ten volunteers who attended the training ranging in age from 21-65.  The document I created to help the volunteers through the cataloging process was well received overall, but I felt there were some improvements that could have been made. The first thing I would change on the document is the font size, a larger type (greater than 12 point) allows the volunteers to easily read the text.  Another feature of the document I would change is using circles to highlight important parts of the screen instead of arrows; arrows have a tendency to get lost in the text. 

Last week, I began creating the finding aid for the Khalid Kwame Collection.  This jazz collection consists of about 10,000 machine readable artifacts (e.g. CDs, Tapes,and Albums), 7,000 pieces of textual documents and a few pieces of AV equipment.  While working on the finding aid I wrote a biography on the Kwame by pulling information about his life from business cards, wills and donor forms.  While writing his biography, I began to understand the importance of keeping and up to date file on all donors so that information about them is readily available.  

Alyss Hardin
IMLS Fellow,  M.L.I.S. 
The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

Week Twenty-Eight at the Maryland State Archives

After devoting so much time to preparing for my presentations in the past few weeks, I spent last week catching up on administrative tasks and responding to reference questions that resulted from my talks. I also continued working on case studies of the Maryland State Colonization Society emigrants. On Thursday, I joined other LOSIM staff to attend the 2012 Symposium on African American History sponsored by Hampton National Historic Site. The symposium’s theme was Free Yet Bound: The African American Community in Baltimore, 1800-1864, and Dr. Christopher Phillips of the University of Cincinnati provided the keynote address. I’ve written more about the symposium on my blog.

In other news, I am delighted to announce that I’ve been appointed to the Mosaic Scholarship Subcommittee of the SAA Awards Committee. It’s a really tough time for new archivists, and I’m excited to find a way to serve SAA and to offer concrete encouragement and support for new archivists.

Krystal

Week 27 at The Mayme A. Clayton Libary & Museum

Last Saturday I gave a presentation/training session to the volunteers about how to catalog a book. For the training session I put together a detailed workflow. I was surprised by the amount of time it takes to successfully construct a receptive workflow. The features of a successful workflow are; being detailed , use arrows and circles to emphasize the important areas of the screen and make the steps bold.

The second part of the training session was focused on pulling Library of Congress Subject Headings. Every item that is cataloged must have at least one subject to facilitate in the retrieval of information through a search. The item I used as an example to pull subject for was a Kwanzaa Kufi Bear. Kufi bears are teddy bears that adorn a Kufi Hat and often have Kente Cloth clothing and/or accessories. MCLM has two Kufi Bears in their collection, and one that is Kwanzaa themed.

Alyss Hardin
The Mayme A Clayton Library & Museum
IMLS Fellow, MLIS

Week Twenty-Seven at the Maryland State Archives

I spent much of last week preparing for two major presentations that I was giving. I called upon many of the skills and knowledge that I developed in grad school to create what I hope were engaging and historically accurate lectures! I like using a lot of images of records in my presentation, and it can take quite some time to find just the right ones that are relevant, concise, and legible enough for introducing the public to history and archives. I think my hard work paid off as I got a great response to both presentations. The first, about African American life in Maryland during the 1860s-1880s, was held at the Laurel Historical Society. The society currently has an exhibit on display that details Laurel’s mill life during that era. Since African Americans were not allowed to work at the mill, the director invited me to speak in order to give a fuller picture of Laurel’s history in the decades after the Civil War. There was an audience of about twenty-five people, who were quite engaged. They enjoyed learning about historical methods for analyzing documents as well as learning more about Maryland’s history. Last Saturday, the Study of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland held a program at the Banneker-Douglass Museum as part of their Harriet Tubman Day activities. I gave a presentation to coincide with our exhibition on flight that is on display at the museum. There were about a dozen attendees, and we had an active discussion about slavery and African American history in Maryland. These experiences reminded me once again how important cultural heritage institutions are in providing informal learning opportunities for the public.

Aaisha’s recent blog post also reminded me that the deadline for applying for a scholarship for the Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference is approaching on March 30. I was able to attend a couple of years ago because I received a scholarship, and it was a great opportunity to learn about and meet new people associated with the rare books side of the field.

Krystal

Week 26 at The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum

My database management skills were on full display last week.  The desktop database has officially migrated over to the full online catalog.  Post-migration there are some things left to do before the database is available for the public. 

In order to jump start our volunteer staff MLCM is holding two training days in the following weeks.  I will be heading the training by teaching a diverse group of volunteers how to catalog a book.  The basic procedure for cataloging books can then be applied to catalog any number of items. Currently, I am developing a workflow that will easily lay out this new procedure. 

Besides database management, I have been working with a volunteer in the writing of a NEH grant.  The grant will bring funding to MCLM to help preserve our vast collection of scrapbooks and photo albums.  Most of the scrapbooks were put together by Dr. Mayme A. Clayton while others were purchased.  An impressive item we have in our collection is a Lena Horne scrapbook.  It is believed this is her personal scrapbook, containing personal information about breaking her leg in 1942, a little known public fact.

Alyss Zohar
The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum
I.M.L.S Fellow, M.L.I.S

Weeks Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six at the Maryland State Archives

It’s been a busy past couple of weeks. I gave a couple of career day presentations at local schools. I was happy to learn that at all of the sessions, at least some of the students knew what archives were! The elementary school students were a bit more excited than the high school students but I felt that both sets came away knowing more about archives than they did before my visit. Last week, I was out of the office most of the time, attending conferences. I attended a symposium, African American Life and Labor in the White House Neighborhood, organized by the White House Historical Association. The symposium was great mix of expertise from academic historians and preservationists to family historians and descendants of blacks from the White House area.  

Later in the week, I attended a three-day, IMLS-sponsored conference called WebWise. In its twelfth year, the conference brings together librarians, archivists, museum professionals, programmers, and others to discuss new directions for sharing information digitally and online. The keynote addresses by LeVar Burton, David Isay of StoryCorps, and John Palfrey of the Digital Public Library of America were particular highlights. I also reconnected with some old friends and made new ones, including many archivists that I know from Twitter. Of particular interest was a presentation on ViewShare, an interface developed by the Library of Congress to help archivists and curators provide access to digital resources. I highly recommend attending future WebWise conferences.

Krystal

Avery Research Center Updates

It has been awhile since I have written, mainly because I have been working very hard to finish processing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) collection. I am happy to say that the collection has been arranged, described, and the finding aid is completed. Yay!!! I am now working on a personal collection of a Miss. Lois A. Simms. 

We are still having trouble converting some EAD/XML records into PDF. I talked to some of the people in the College of Charleston’s Special Collections department and they sometimes have the same issue. However, no one is sure why it occurs. Thus, we are left to go through the code line by line to see if there is something that is wrong. This can be quite interesting and tedious. As of today, I have gone through that XML at least 10 times, but I still do not see what is wrong with it. One day I will be glad to report that this is fixed, hopefully sooner than later. Another project that I have been working on is creating MARC records for the collections. I am still tinkering and playing with the MARCedit software to get the record to come out correctly.

In order to celebrate the theme of Black History this year, which is African-American Women, I am working on an exhibit that highlights the contribution of Charleston, South Carolina, and Southern women to American History. I am using material from the archival and library collection to bring attention to the work that was done by these individuals.

Read more here.

Aaisha Haykal

Avery Research Center