Problems with Processing

Hi Everyone! 

This week, I officially started processing the Yao family papers, which is exciting but also quite challenging. Although I spent the first few weeks surveying the documents and took my time to draft the processing plan carefully, my proposed processing plan still proved to be ineffective. As I was sorting through the photographs in the collection, I realized that some photos do not belong to any of my conceptualized categories. Additionally, I discovered that when I was surveying the collection, my categorization of the photographs was not standardized. For instance, I sometimes placed the photos of Claremont boy scouts under  the “people” category, and other times under “Claremont.” Thus, facing these problems, my week was not as productive as I wanted it to be. 

However, it was definitely fun to do the detective work to find the connections between the photographs and group the relevant and related ones together. 

Since the library will be closed on Friday in recognition of Cesar Chavez day and I usually work all day on Fridays, I will only work seven hours this week. 

Hope you have a good week! 

Marcus