Hello! This week feels like it went by very fast, probably because I fit a lot of different steps of the archival process into just a few days. The Padua Hills Theatre Collection is now well on its way to digitized completion!
The first accomplishment of the week was creating a finding aid in Archivists’ Toolkit, which was even more gratifying when I got to see a copy printed out for proofreading. I also got started with scanning, beginning with some of the photos and postcards featuring images of the theater and the Mexican Players and then moving on to the advertisement fliers. Then we went over metadata entry for items as they will be cataloged in the City of Claremont History Collection at the Claremont Colleges Digital Library. I took a lot of notes on what information to put where, and with the help of a few templates I was able to get a majority of the fliers and their metadata uploaded on Thursday. Next week I will get finish with the fliers and also get the playbills and newsletters scanned and uploaded.
Many of the steps will have to be revisited when I finally have a completed folder count and numbering system in place, and then I will add the final numbers into each record on both Archivists’ Toolkit and the metadata fields in the digitized records. I have been hesitant to move forward with the numbering part until we know exactly how many additional newsletters from Carpe Diem we will end up with. There are 23 total that could be coming in, which could be divided into several folders depending on the years represented. It will just be easier to wait for the items to be in hand than to build around them, but it is very unsatisfying to leave information out of all the cataloging entries knowing that I will have to go back through every one later! Especially since I only have about three weeks left to work, and a lot of Finkle maps to move around!