During the sixth week at The HistoryMakers, I had to take a
few days off, we hosted 15 volunteers from the Southern Edison Company, and I
worked on a database comparison project.
This week at work was marked by my unexpected absence. On
Saturday evening, I had to go to Tucson, Arizona to be with my family because
my father was in the hospital. The drive was about 8 hours and I had a lot of
time to reflect on what is really important in life. I have built my little world,
ranked my priorities, and behaved according to my personal constitution. All of
this gives me an artificial sense of control, when it just takes a simple phone
call, and the entire house of cards falls down. I’m not trying to give up my
commitments and study the meaning of life but I do want to remember to retain the
double consciousness when I am getting frustrated with e-mail strings, project
deadlines, and incompatible communication styles. These things matter but the
really smart people remember that other things matter more. I appreciate the
understanding and compassion from my colleagues at The HistoryMakers and The
Mayme Clayton Library and Museum as I stepped away from my role as a fellow for
a few days. I came back to work on Thursday, and I am steadily taking on the
back log, one step at a time.
On Thursday, Cara and I went over the list of potential
tasks for the Southern California Edison group. We were expecting 40 people and
Larry had mandated that we utilize them effectively, assigning them the type of
work that moves our collection forward. On the morning of the event, we had 15
people show up and a third of them were children with their parents. Cara set
one little girl and her mother to work describing the dolls in one of our
collections. I took the other four girls and two adults to help me with the
book collection and Mayme’s papers. I had the two elementary school aged girls
pull the books that were published before 1945 out of our duplicates. They have
a value that can be exploited as we de-accession materials from the collection.
The two middle school aged girls sorted Mayme’s rolodex and business cards
alphabetically and made folders for the “contacts” subseries in the collection.
I had the two adults helping me with filing the materials that I had already
sorted from the collection. Everyone did an amazing job and helped me to cross
those items off of my “to-do” list. We had discussions about the importance of
archives and the future of the MCLM; it felt nice to enable other people to be
a part of the maintenance of this re-emerging institution.
The Mayme Clayton Library and Museum currently uses the
Cuadra Star database software. The institution originally contracted the
software for free, but when the company came under new management, MCLM was
essentially priced out of using the software effectively. We have negotiated a
deal that allows us to access our materials on a reduced scale for a limited time
or until we figure out something else. Alyss had done research on different
databases and made recommendations before she left and I have been asked to
follow up on it. I have worked with various databases in my past but I have
never been involved in an implementation. My immediate thought with the budget constrictions
would be an open source software like Archon or Archivists’ Toolkit, but do we
have the technological expertise or system requirements to set it up? In between
the processing of Mayme’s papers, the managing of volunteers, I am researching
the feasibility of various database software packages.
No comments:
Post a Comment