Second Week!

I thought it was worth an update now that I've had a few days to settle into my main task and its location (an offsite warehouse).

My main project for this internship is processing a variety of materials which have belonged to the Witte for some time but were collected before the Collection Policy was in effect for archival materials. There's a nice sea of boxes and each one can contain a pretty decent amount of books, pamphlets, academic journals and bulletins, as well as other similar items. I take each box, number it, and open it to unearth its riches. Then I type in a particular document all of the pertinent details for each object-- at this point that would be title, author(s), edition/year of publication, condition (most of them look pretty good for having gone through a few decades of use), box number, and the number of local libraries which also have a copy (which I find by looking them up in WorldCat, a site which allows libraries around the world to share information regarding what they have in their collections). Then I put them all back in their box, move it to a different portion of the room, and bring on the next box to be processed.

I've been learning many things already through this project:

--A lighter box can be better than a heavy box, because the lighter box may contain bigger items which take more space in the box. After processing one box which had what felt like five hundred tiny booklets featuring scientific research on insects, I am very pleased when a box has just a few nice big things in it. However, there are (of course) exceptions to this rule, because the heaviest box so far had big books in it, and one of the lightest ones (next up after I finish the current one) is so light because it has many tiny little publications in it.

--It can be very fun to glean little bits of information from books and things, even when you're not actually reading them. Whomever assumes that my task would be boring has not seen such intriguing titles as "Anatomy of Xylem and Phloem of the Datiscaceae," "A Review of the Swifts of Genus Hirundapus (Aves: Apodidae)" and "New Cerambycid Beetles Belonging to the Tribe Disteniini from Central and South America." Besides how Seuss-ian the very serious, scientific titles may sound, there is also the puzzle of trying to figure out what they are talking about (sometimes easy, sometimes not) and also the fun of trying to spellcheck things when the spellchecker doesn't even like the words when you have spelled them correctly. The occasional possible spelling error is a needle in a haystack of squiggly red lines.

In the four days I have worked there, I have completed 13 boxes. The artifacts I have seen run the gamut from amazing (a few beautiful items from the 19th century!) to the simply strange (multiple copies of the same magazine article). I look forward to what I might discover next!