Day 6

Unfortunately I have no pictures for this post, I forgot to take some. This Wednesday I helped weed the collection of books in the archives. It was actually really cool, I didn't feel as guilty as I thought I would doing it because I knew it needed to be done and those books didn't fit the collection anymore. We weeded stuff that was generally about Tennessee or other places. I'm not sure why they were accepted in the first place because those don't fit the policy, but the archivists before her didn't seem to know what they were doing anyway. All sorts of stories of things done really badly etc. Anyways, my supervisor pulled the ones she felt needed to go and it was my job to look them up in the catalog and separate them into piles, the ones that only the archive has, the ones that are duplicated in the library as well as the archive, and any that had catalog problems. We decided to ask the genealogy room if they wanted the ones that only the archive had. The duplicates were decided to be discarded. I found a really interesting inscription in one of the discards and pointed it out, apparently that was an inscription to someone very important to the area so we are swapping it with the generic one in the collection in the genealogy room! So that was a really cool find.

Then Thursday I was given a mission, since October is American Archives Month, Tennessee Archives Month, and Family History Months I had to find the themes of each and come up with ideas we can do for them. This proved actually difficult to track down an actual theme but for the most part I think I figured it out. I also was to find outreach ideas because Kingsport’s centennial is coming up in 2017. Lastly to come up with archives blog posts and general exhibits we could do. I was really excited about all these tasks because I like coming up with ideas for them. That being said I'm still working on all of it and most likely will be all weekend because I just can't stop myself. :) Think that’s probably a good problem to have that I just want to keep working even when I don't need to. Well, that’s all for this week! Remember archives adventures are out there!