Week 3 - Dipping Our Toes

This week, Lisa and I delved further into the files from the first drawer of the first file cabinet - we met at the UCF library to not only work together on cataloging the files but also to bounce more ideas around about how we wanted to organize the materials and present the materials to future researchers looking to use the information of the Frank Laumer collection. 

Working on files at UCF library

During this meeting, we both decided that while we will finish the first drawer of cabinet files, we want to venture further into the archive and dip our toes into the bulk of the organizational needs at the site. I am extremely interested in the historic books that are at the archive and have been antsy to begin organizing and cataloging those, and with the limited time we will have this summer, it may take creating organizational methods to be built on with future internships rather than reinventing the wheel altogether. 

The files, while sometimes askew, do have a method to the madness - Laumer appears to have kept together his related correspondence with specific references to the primary or secondary literature at hand. One file, specifically about Seminole War soldier Joseph Sprague, contains Laumer's correspondence with other researchers, genealogists, and county clerks alongside the (sometimes) obtained genealogical information of this specific soldier. Some of the correspondence leads to dead ends. 

This was a problem I pondered in my last posting; is it pertinent for researchers to sift through countless papers of correspondence in order to find historical evidence? Part of me believes it could aid in veering researchers from going down the same dead-end paths - while the other part fears it would needlessly lengthen the amount of time spent in the archive looking for valuable information. This research is also dated, so keeping that correspondence may not help contemporary researchers who are possibly in the presence of newly discovered source materials. With this in mind, and with our desire to venture into the back room of the archive that is filled with materials yet to be sifted through, I believe we will focus on relabeling the files in the cabinets, cleaning out excessive copies, removing some of the correspondence to different files, and switching the materials to archive-grade holdings, such as acid-free folders.

In coming up with ways to catalog the materials for future researchers to use, Lisa and I thought about making a simple excel spreadsheet with ascension numbers. This way future interns could edit it themselves and even see what we were able to get through during our time at the archive - and hopefully build off of that work as well. I have come up with a tentative example workbook of what we would use: 

Topics

Subtopics

Documents and descriptions

Ultimately, documents would be organized by topics, which the user would choose from on the first page, then this would lead them to subtopics, then documents, which would be organized by ascension numbers that we will work on assigning. This will be the biggest challenge for me, as this is my first venture into archival work and we are truly at the helm of handling this collection. However, with a possible cataloging system in place and an idea of how we can better protect and organize the materials, it will be exciting to move around the archive and find a practice for the known and unknown materials that lay there.