Archive Project Response

For my archives project, I chose to describe the collection of Robert Dana papers in the Cornell College Archive and to make a finding aid for the same collection.  Included in this collection are three boxes of papers and photographs.

This was a very straightforward assignment, but one that presented me with some trouble; I was uncertain of how to properly describe a collection and did quite a bit of online research before beginning the project.

I have’t run into much trouble (aside from weather and time issues) during the project, though at this point I still have a box and a half left to describe.  It was very exiting to see what information archivists had decided to save previously and sometimes akin to putting together a jigsaw puzzle in deciding how to describe objects.

One thing that I was uncertain about was the organization of the boxes.  I did not know whether or not the papers had come in with this sort of organization from Dana himself or from an earlier archivist, so changing the organization at all was out of the question–though whether or not it would have been useful was questionable.  I also found books of Dana’s within one of the boxes, which should likely have been in the front room with other Cornellian publications.  To me this suggested that Cornell’s archive had suffered the same fate as many other small archives–lack of standards due to a train of caretakers.