Chaitra Powell: Week 8 @ The Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum

During my eighth week at the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, I attended the 7^th Annual Archives Bazaar, surveyed the C. Jerome Woods Collection and put together a work plan for volunteer projects at the MCLM.

The Archives Bazaar is a wonderful event put on by the LA as Subject group, out of the University of Southern California (USC). All of the archival collections and institutions in southern California set up a table and share their materials with the public. Along with a volunteer, Lena, I set up the table for the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum and we worked for the first half of the event. We brought scrapbooks, photographs, periodicals, pamphlets, sheet music and books. We were also selling magnets and pencils. It seemed like a constant stream of people that were interested in our collection. Some of the highlights included UCLA and San Jose State University graduate students in library science programs who wanted to volunteer and people who were interested in doing research at MCLM.

The C. Jerome Woods Collection is an assortment of materials related to the black LGBTQ community in Los Angeles. We recently received a grant of $10,000 to process this collection. I conducted a survey of the materials and discovered items as diverse as a reverend’s robes and souvenir condom packs. There are a lot of materials that are oversized because they have been used on display in the past. I have talked with Mr. Woods extensively about why he chose to place his materials here, why it is on deposit rather than a gift, and how he expects his collection to grow in the future. When I asked why he did not feel as though the collection would be a better fit at the ONE archives at USC, he shared how he had known Mayme and Avery and knew that the materials here would always be available to the community. He was very enthusiastic at the prospect have having his materials processed, after he saw what I had been doing with the Mayme papers. My survey revealed that although his collection is made of diverse mediums, the scope is narrow and the extent is relatively small, so will be able to get through those materials in a short amount of time.

Throughout the week, Larry, Cara and I have been talking about how to make the most of our amazing volunteers. The amount of hours that they contribute and the quality of work that they are capable of are too valuable to be treated haphazardly. We identified the projects that individuals are currently working on, and established a reasonable work plan of when they could expect to finish up. We also talked with the volunteers; in order to see their process make sure that anyone could pick up where any individual left off. We are trying to embark on a large book cataloging project, and we want to be sure that there are not any loose ends in the processing of other collections in the museum. I have had a good time talking with the volunteers one on one. The volunteers are either older individuals whose life trajectories are worthy of the HistoryMakers or graduate students with an interest in Black history or archives. Basically everyone is who I am or who I aspire to be, so it is very easy to connect with them.