William McKissack Papers
I have finished processing the College Hill subseries
slightly ahead of schedule. The result
is seventeen boxes of materials pertaining to the College Hill Apartments and
Homes built for African Americans in Nashville, Tennessee, in the mid-twentieth
century. Included in this subseries are materials such as correspondence,
receipts, invoices, payroll information, and Federal Housing Authority records.
Three of the boxes are closed due to their inclusion of personal identification
information (i.e. social security numbers).
All of the records are dated 1949-1951.
I then began processing the Office Records series before moving
on to the other projects so that I will have a location to place all general
and miscellaneous office files that I am bound to find in the other project
files. At this stage in the
organization, I am arranging the subseries and folders. So far there are about five boxes of
materials including payroll records, general office receipts, licensing, and
advertising information. One of those
boxes will remain closed due to the inclusion of personal information. There appear to be about seven more boxes to
process for this series, but it is difficult to determine how long each box
will take since it depends heavily on the type and clarity of information found
within them. My goal is to finish this
series in the first few weeks of January but it may actually be closer to the
end of January before it is completed since I only have two weeks to work on
this in December. The school is closed
the last two weeks of the month, so I will spend time at the end of the month
evaluating oral history interviews for The HistoryMakers.
Challenges and Changes:
Now that the largest series is completed, the challenge is
to maintain consistency throughout the rest of the collection while also using
the most accurate terms to describe the entirety of the section being
described. One example of this is how I
was originally using “Accounts” as a subseries for the College Hill projects
section. It was more or less a
placeholder until I could determine a more accurate and appropriate term. As I began using “Accounts” for the Office
Records series, a better term finally occurred to me: “Vendors”.
After a quick search of Dictionary.com, I
found “vendor” to be defined as “a person or agency that sells.” This definition is much more accurate than the
more generally defined “accounts,” so I am confident that this term is more
descriptive and thus increases accessibility of the records to the researchers.
Another challenge is in separating the Office Records
series. I am removing all information
that specifies a project because I will place that material in the project
series. However, there are records that
do not specify a project but do specify a place where a project might be
assumed. It appears that the firm would
open a temporary office location at each project site or at least in the town
where the project is located. For
instance, I have come across many records out of Memphis, TN. McKissack
and McKissack did have a few projects in Memphis, so I am having difficulty
in determining if the addresses found on the receipts are the locations of the
projects or an office location near one of the projects. If each address goes to a specific project,
then all of that information can be placed in the subseries pertaining to that
project. However, if there was a general
office in Memphis that handled these projects, then I would need to consider a
subseries in Office Records that includes these satellite office
locations. I think that I will not be
able to get a full picture of this until I am nearly completed with this
series, so I am collecting records that pertain to Memphis in a separate folder
that I will go back through when I finish this series so that I might better
determine where to place the materials within this collection.
Quarterly Survey time
Week 14 saw the submittal of our quarterly (more accurately,
half-time) survey report as well as our monthly conference call with The
HistoryMakers. While all of the fellows
seem to be gaining our own unique experiences, we all remain on track with our
projects. There also seems to be
improvement in the recording of the oral history interview evaluations. From this point forward, we will be using a
version of Survey Monkey to conduct our evaluations. By all outward appearances, it seems to be
much more streamlined and easy to manage.
Next week, I will use this survey for my next interviews. I look forward to it improving our time in
processing the oral histories.
Until next time…
Amanda J.
Carter
Franklin
Library, Fisk University
IMLS
HistoryMakers Fellow 2012-2013
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