William McKissack Papers
Upon my return from the Christmas and New Year holiday, I continued to process the Office files series of the William McKissack Papers. I have resolved the dilemma I discussed in my last post about the index cards with name and contact information. I have placed the index cards for employees under the Personnel subseries and am placing the index cards of apparent tenant requests under the Properties subseries as “tenant indexes.” I will explain in the scope and content note or an abstract that the tenant cards appear to be for College Hill, but because of the multiple properties held by the McKissack’s in Nashville and the lack of identifying information linking directly to College Hill, the index cards will remain in the Office files series which contains all materials not related to one specific project.
The remaining Office files materials are processing rather smoothly. I am on schedule to finish going through all of the boxes by the end of the week. I hope to be able to make one last pass through this series to add dates and ensure the folders are labeled accurately. I still have approximately thirty-five more boxes to process and numerous blueprints to clean and process.
Challenges:
While I have remained on schedule so far in this project, my supervisor Ms. Mattie recently discovered that processing the blueprints takes much longer than we originally estimated so that may inhibit my schedule nearer the end. It is always a very tricky balance between quality and expediency so that may very well be my most persistent challenge this year. Now even as I remain on schedule, I cannot forget that there are always impediments waiting so I must be prepared to work as efficiently as I can without sacrificing quality of work. Fortunately, most of the remaining series are projects that will resemble the College Hill subseries and have its basic structure which may quicken the pace.
Hopefully by next week I will be able to report that the
Office files series is completed and that I have moved on to the Hot Springs project. Have a wonderful
week!
Until next time…
Amanda J. Carter
Franklin Library, Fisk University
IMLS HistoryMakers Fellow 2012-2013
Hi Amanda. I checked my notes and it indeed was the James E. Campbell Papers (http://ow.ly/gHdxR) that the Baldwin materials were from. Also, I enjoyed reading your blog post about your work on the Rev. Elaine Flake interview. My family goes to her and her husband's church, the Allen A.M.E. Cathedral.
ReplyDeleteThank you for verifying that, Ardra! I'll check out the collection. I really enjoyed Rev. Flake's interview. You should check it out if it is posted. It's one of my favorites so far!
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