Starting a new adventure can bring on feelings of excitement and fear. Which are the exact feelings I felt during the first week of my summer CCEPS Archival Fellowship. My name is Natalie Rocha and I am currently a graduate student in History and Archival Studies. Up until this point all my archival knowledge and experience has come from class exercises and textbook examples. This fellowship is going to be my first attempt at processing and archiving an entire collection. Taking on an entire collection from start to finish can seem daunting, but I know with the help of Lisa Crane and everyone here at Special Collections I will be able to take on this new challenge.
The Roland Jackson Papers is the collection I will be working on during my fellowship. The collection was created by Jackson and covers his academic career from 1949-2007. He was a musicologist and came to Claremont in the 1970s. The collection contains a total of 16 boxes.
This week I have started the task of doing a survey of the collection, which requires me to quickly go through the collection in order to get a general idea of the content and material inside each box. During the survey it is important to see if I will need to fix or rehouse any material into new boxes or folders. I have been able to go through the first three boxes and I am impressed with the overall condition of the papers and order of the collection.
The collection is in chronological order and the papers within each folder line up with the dates on each folder (which is a bonus). However, the collection does need to be rehoused in new boxes and folders. Box 3 is too big for the number of folders in the box, which is causing the folders to slump and create papers with permanent curves.
Next week I will continue to conduct my survey and hopefully share some interesting finds. Some of the boxes were restricted and were not allowed to be open until 2010. Therefore, I will be the first person to open these boxes.