Slow week at the archives

This week the computers at the archives were all being updated so there wasn't a lot of work that I could do.
Instead of working on my collection, I helped a graduate assistant with her work.
The collection she is working on about Deborah's Place had a lot of news print. In archiving, original news print is often recycled or disposed of because of the low quality and vulnerability of the paper. The originals are photo copied on to acid free paper and as usual any metal paper clips or staples are removed. This ensure that the news article will be preserved for a longer period of time.

I came across some interesting articles about Deborah's Place including the process of opening it and some of the controversy behind it. Some residents of the neighborhood weren't completely on board with the opening of a home for battered and homeless women so close to them, but luckily the center was opened despite any issues in 1985.

For the rest of this week, I will be finishing my collection and possibly starting a new project. More to come later!

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.

Videos

      Today I moved on to the A/V portion of the Gannon Center collection. Part of processing requires that the archivist look through all A/V material to make sure that it is labeled correctly and is in good quality.
     I watched quite a few video cassettes about G.C. events and lectures which was interesting and I got to see just how much the Gannon Center has done over the years. Among these videos, there were a few recordings of speakers from the Center's Women's Conference including Sandra Cisneros!
     I've been a fan of her writing for a while so I was excited to see her speak at an event at Loyola. She read a piece she wrote for a magazine about the impact of color in our lives. It was similar to this piece.
     Besides seeing Ms. Cisneros, I also came across an interesting film entitle "Brides of Christ" which is a fictional portrayal of nuns in the 1960s in the US. Although I didn't have time to watch the whole thing, I will definitely be checking it out later.
     Finally, I ended the day by watching a student made film from Mundelein College Class of '55. They made a silent film document interesting events during their four years at Mundelein by reenacting each event. It was really interesting to see what is now Loyola's campus from 60 years ago. It was also really interesting to see the environment of an all-women's college on video. Although I've gotten a sense of the feeling of community at Mundelein from other documents that I've processed, it was even clearer in video. There was such a sense of friendship and camaraderie among the women.
    On Friday, I'll be finishing with the last box of videos and then beginning the process of organizing all of the processed material into some sort of sensible order. I can't believe I'm almost done going through all of the material! It's certainly gone by much quicker than I thought, but I am eager to see the completed  collection.

Reproductive Justice

     Today was the first of the WLA spring speaker series so we all got to hear a graduate student give an incredibly informative presentation on reproductive justice in Boricua and Chicana histories.

     She began by explaining to the history of abuses to Puerto Rican women during the 1950s and 1960s. During this time, birth control pills were tested on hundreds of women without their consent or knowledge; they were simply given a pill (which were 20-30 times more potent then than they are now) by a doctor and told that it would be beneficial for their health. Sterilization procedures or "La Operacion" were also widely used on women with sketchy consent forms and little to no knowledge on the part of the patients as to the consequences of the procedure. 

     Consequently, by the 1970s about 30% of Puerto Rican women were sterile; more women than any other country. These atrocities instigated a strong feminist movement by Puerto Rican women to reclaim their rights and recognize the injustices of these procedures. They fought for society to recognize that women had the right to choose whether or not they wanted children.

     The speaker also touched on similar feminist movements in Chicana communities where women embraced their culture and argued that having children or deciding against it was their right. 

    It was also really interesting to understand the differences between feminist groups according to the way they identify themselves. For example, feminist groups consisting of women of color like the Chicanas tend to incorporate both sexism and racism in their work while White feminists often focus on sexism alone. This difference can be seen, for example, in the way Chicana women celebrate their position as women and caretakers for large families while some White feminists might see this as sexist and a result of patriarchal society.

    Finally, the speaker told us about some organizations that are focused on the issue of reproductive health in Latina women like Mujeres Latinas en Accion.

    The speaker was great and I'm so glad I got to hear about an issue that is under publicized or even unknown. 

I'm a real archivist!!

...not really, but I did get to try out a different step in the archival process; accessions.

busy at work with the Gannon Center collection

     This is the first thing that archivists do after receiving material from a donor. The process includes looking through the material and using pretty vague categorization to input information about the collection into a software program like Past Perfect or Archivists' Toolkit. Since this is a preliminary step, the description of the collection doesn't have to be very detailed.

     While going through this collection, which was donated by a Mundelein College alumna, I was floored by how much stuff this woman has preserved over the years! She has all of her class notes, exams, syllabi, and papers from high school and college! 

 

    The best part of going through her materials, dating from 1963-1968, was that there newspaper clippings and fliers from that period. I found a news story about JFK's assassination in her high school newspaper and a flier advertising an anti-Vietnam protest. It was so interesting to see the similarities between the message on that flier and the Occupy movement today; apparently things haven't changed very much. 

2011

    

1968

 After putting the information into the software, I returned to the Gannon Center collection and continued sorting through everything. I got to the planning/proposal material which outlined how Carolyn Farrell and others began the process of opening the center. I'm almost done with print material so on Friday I get to move on to A/V!!

Archival Science

If there's one thing I've learned during my time at the WLA its that archivers are incredibly patient! Event going through my small collection is pretty painstaking. The amount of paper and information is a little overwhelming; I can only imagine the difficulty in managing a larger collection!

Even though its a little tedious and monotonous going through this material, its still interesting. I've learned a lot about the history of Mundelein College and the spirit of feminism and social justice that pervaded it. There a bunch of pictures from Mundelein at WLA's new facebook page:

While going through the materials in this collection, I've also learned about archival science. There is actually quite a bit of chemistry that goes into the process of archiving. Folders and boxes must have a pH of 7 so avoid acidification, photos must be kept in enclosures, and all metals (including staples and paper clips) must be remove to avoid oxidation/rusting which would damage the material. As a science major, I thought this was very interesting and it was nice to be able to see a bridge between science and history.