Month: December 2019

Posted on by seanb

End of the Road

This is the final week of my fellowship, and this will be my final blog post. I completed my presentation today and I’m proud to report that it went very well. The materials I laid out for the audience definitely garnered some interest, and the audience asked great questions. I was especially happy that Dr. Gabriele Carey came to my presentation. She taught my introductory archives course in Fall 2018 that processed the first half of the collection, so I thought she would appreciate learning that the collection had been fully processed.

On that note, I am equally glad to have learned from a member of the Special Collections staff that this collection is highly sought after. Many researchers at the Claremont Colleges have already expressed interest in perusing the collection. Moving forward, I am proud to know that the story of the UFW and the voices of people like Socorro Gomez-Potter and Yolanda Esquivel will be heard.

I want to thank the Claremont Center for Engagement with Primary Sources and Lisa Crane for giving me this wonderful opportunity. I learned a lot through this fellowship, and those skills will be valuable as I move forward. Thanks to the special collections staff at the Claremont Colleges library, who very graciously opened up the processing room early and closed it late on many occasions to accommodate my hectic schedule. I am very grateful.

Happy Holidays to you all, and I hope you all have a wonderful New Year.

-Sean

Posted on by seanb

Finishing touches

My presentation will be next week on Thursday December 19th at 11:00 am. My PowerPoint is all but finished, but I will look it over a bit more tomorrow and determine if I should add anything. I’m looking forward to presenting, and I am most eager to field questions from the audience about the collection.

Next week will be quite busy for sure. I have two final papers due next week, along with the presentation. As the fellowship winds to a close, I must say that I will miss working with Matt Garcia Papers. There is so much information here that I did not have a chance to read through as I was processing. If I did not have my own MA thesis to work on, I may very well return to the collection as a researcher. I’m sure it will be in high demand, and I hope that my work will make it easier for researchers to quickly identify which materials best suit their needs.

My final week of the fellowship and final blog post will be next week. I usually post on Fridays, but I may post next week’s blog after the presentation. So, look out for my final entry next Thursday!

Posted on by seanb

Preparation

I sincerely hope everyone had a restful holiday break. I did not do much traveling, but upon my return I am feeling renewed and energized. Over the course of this week I have tweaked and rewritten elements of the front matter for the finding aid. It is virtually finished, but as long as there is time left in the fellowship, I will continually return to it and make sure to correct any errors or make adjustments as I see fit. At this point, as has been the case for at least the past few weeks now, the only major task left is my presentation. 

I have a confession to make on the topic of presentations. While I do not fear public speaking, I usually refrain from using PowerPoint. I do not care for it very much, and I do not believe I have sat through any PowerPoint presentation in which I was not incredibly bored. I certainly see its value in some situations, but all too often I see it used as a crutch. Indeed, there is a clear value in using PowerPoint for my own presentation, which I hesitantly began creating yesterday. I want my audience to see many of the materials I have worked with, and I cannot haul over and lay out the entire extent of the collection. So, I plan to fill the slideshow primarily with images.  

I am excited to share my experiences with the collection, as well as a few highlights of the collection, with the library staff and other guests. I have not scheduled a date quite yet, but I imagine it will be sometime during finals week. In the meantime, I will continue preparing for my presentation and selecting materials to showcase.