Week 5: Completion of Arrangement

This week, I am happy to say that I have been able to complete the arranging of the Ruth C. Engs collection up at the archives.  Overall, I must say that the process of completing the arrangement went a lot faster than I had initially expected.  Although some of the series that I processed last, mainly the teaching files, were less organized to begin with than were the files related to research and writing, the fact that the individual files were bigger (and, therefore, there were less of them per box) made the latter stages of the arrangement go more quickly.  The fact that Professor Engs had created and outlined a basic organizational structure for her papers also greatly facilitated the process of arranging collection.

On the whole, I think that the collection has the potential to be very useful and interesting to scholars interested in studying the history of health sciences, or more specifically, in studying the history of views and theories about substance abuse and use, since much of Ruth Engs' research deals with this subject matter.  The collection thoroughly documents her research and her publications, containing notes and correspondence about and drafts of many of her publications.  Based on archival collections I have dealt with in the past, I would say that the documentation of the research and publishing process is much more thorough in this collection than in most. The collection also contains a good deal of interesting non-text materials, including some VHS, DVD, and film recordings of presentation material.

In total, the collection will contains 16 boxes of material, with a 17th box dedicated to oversized material.  Originally, the collection was housed in about 24 boxes before I started arranging it, but, because I was able to remove some duplicate materials and pack the boxes in a more condensed way, we will be able to save some space.

The next step in the processing of this collection will be the creating of a finding aid for the collection.  While I have already started working on this step a bit, I will hold off on discussing it for now and dedicate my next post to this stage of the processing.