Hello! I am Amanda J. Carter, Franklin Library, Fisk University’s fellow for the 2012-2013 Increasing African American Diversity in Archives: The HistoryMakers Fellowship, Mentoring, Training and Placement Institute. While I am excited to work with Franklin Library in September, these first few months of posts will concentrate on the three-month intensive immersion training we fellows will have here in Chicago at The HistoryMakers.
Talk about “intensive immersion”! This week was filled to the brim with new training, procedures, and knowledge. Every day consisted of instruction or training that either expanded on my knowledge or presented a new aspect of my responsibilities in the program. While my body may have been exhausted at the end of each day’s experience, my mind was always exhilarated to learn something new.
On Sunday, we met at The HistoryMaker’s office and had lunch and a tour. The founder of The HistoryMakers, Julieanna Richardson not only met me at the door, but sat down and spoke to me for a few minutes about how I was settling in to Chicago. I greatly appreciate the time she took out of her busy schedule to speak to me individually as it helped me to reduce my overall anxiety of moving to a new city and beginning a new career. That half-day was great preparation for what was to come.
The next morning we were given the usual office rules and procedures as well as the training for the interview evaluations. Even though we had some of the afternoon and the next day to work on our first project, I felt like I was limping through the group evaluation assignment. After a few more meetings, clarifications, critiques, and much support and guidance from the archivist Dan Johnson, I was finally ready to begin my own assigned evaluation by Wednesday. However, we first had to meet for our African American history lecture with Dr. Christopher Reed where we reviewed our textbook chapters on African history, the Middle Passage, and African Americans in colonial America. We also discussed some Chicago history. I appreciated Dr. Reed’s acknowledgment of different types of documents (e.g. diaries, photographs, letters), especially in relation to archival preservation, as that is not always mentioned within discussions of history.
By Wednesday afternoon, I was feeling a little more confident about my interview evaluation assignment, but I was only about halfway finished by evening. The next two days were filled with a workshop by Dr. Katherine Wisser discussing EAD and EAC-CPF. While I have worked with EAD in the past, I have never before understood it as I do now. Furthermore, I have never had much interaction with EAC-CPF, so those two days were very enlightening. It was also great to get out on Thursday evening and have dinner with the office staff. Everyone is so busy trying to accomplish mammoth tasks during that day, it is nice to be able to socialize and become better acquainted over delicious Thai cuisine.
So far, the first week went really well. Everyone at the office is kind and helpful and all of the fellows are willing to share experiences and help each other to achieve our summertime goal of thirty interview evaluations and finding aids and processing of a few special collections physical record sets. I consider myself extremely fortunate that I have this opportunity to expand access to African American archives and I look forward to not only what I can learn, but how I can contribute to the phenomenal organization that has given me this opportunity, The HistoryMakers.
Amanda J. Carter
2012-2013 The HistoryMakers IMLS Fellow
Franklin Library, Fisk University
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