This week I worked on the finding aid for the Gannon Center collection. The finding aid serves as an outline or overview for the material in a collection. I began by writing a short administrative history of the Gannon Center covering its foundation, its mission, and some of its activities. All finding aids have this short background whether it’s about an organization or an individual. I then worked on creating subject words which are essentially key words that describe the collection as a whole. The subject words are determined from the Library of Congress Authorities once the collection is associated with one of these key words or subjects, a researcher can use any of them to find this collection online.

                The subject words were kind of tricky to choose because I had to figure out which would encompass the collection as a whole and then see if they were available on the Library of Congress authorities.  A lot of the subjects I chose at first were not available including Ann Ida Gannon and BVM sisters so I chose more general subjects instead like Loyola University Chicago and Women and Leadership.

                The next step in creating the finding aid involves putting all of the folders of material into series and then into boxes. I had my series organized already so I fit all of the folders into boxes and created a list of the folders by each box in the finding aid.

                While the majority of the finding aid is complete, I will have to make some edits and then I will move on to the final steps of creating a collection.     

Creating a Collection

After a lot of sorting and sifting through papers, I've finally finished rehousing all of the documents in the Gannon Center collection into new folders. Although it was somewhat tedious going through the papers, it was actually really fun to see documentation of everything from the initial proposal to create the center to events and especially the many speakers the Gannon Center hosted.

On Tuesday, I began the next step in the process; creating series and a more complete collection. I've chosen four series: Administration, Events, Publications, and A/V. I sorted each individual folder into the appropriate series alphabetically. On Friday, I will begin fixing small restoration errors that I've made like forgetting to unfold documents or using the wrong folders then I will begin to create the finding aid.

The finding aid is essentially the document used to navigate the collection with information about each folder listen by series and box number. The finding aid also requires a small administrative history about the center as well as some key words that can be used by researchers to find the collection. These words are determined by listings in the Library of Congress and are very useful because any of those terms will lead a researcher to the Gannon Center collection.

Finally, I will transfer some of the A/V materials including CDs and DVDs to a digital system called DocFinity so that there are backups of all of the information.