Tuesday, May 15, 2012

May Avery Research Center Updates (Week 31-36)


Public Program

Since I last posted, I have completed all the interviews that I am doing for the Black in the Lowcountry project. I am so excited. So far I have completed transcribed three of the College of Charleston student interviews and have one left to do for that phase and for the second phase I finished the high school student interviews today. The college students were a little bit easier to get information and stories from, but the high school students did well and I think that the project gave them an opportunity to express themselves.

Archives

I finished describing and arranging the various collections (i.e. small collections that consist of 1-5 folders). This week I will begin to label the folders.

I created MARC records for the Lois Simms collection that I processed previously and sent this one as well as others over the cataloging department so that they can be put into the library’s and WorldCat catalog. In order to continue the workflow of creating MARC records, I created a guide to help Ms. Mayo and the new fellow with creating them, so that they can benefit from my experiences.

Last week was busy as we had three interviews for the Archival Manager position here at Avery, each of the candidates had their pros and cons and I hope that the search committee makes a good hiring decision.  

Activities

This past weekend was the 150th anniversary of Robert Smalls capturing of the Confederate vessel The Planter. I most of the events of the weekend including the unveiling of a Historic Marker and Historic Plaque in downtown; the marker is located where he and the crew captured the vessel and the plaque is near where he picked up his wife and children. I also had the opportunity to meet some of his descendants who came down from the event. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Smalls as I was before I came to Charleston, more information can be found here:


SN: I found a lot of people from the way of Buffalo and Syracuse at this event, it was interesting to interact with them and people from the New York area, made me feel like home!

Aaisha Haykal
IMLS Fellow
Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture

No comments:

Post a Comment