Keeping Busy at the Archives

Things have been quite busy over the last few days at my internship at the archives, so I have taken a brief hiatus from working on the Ruth Engs collection to complete some other small projects at the archives and assist some patrons who are currently working on research.  While working on the Engs collection is enjoyable, it is also nice to have a bit of a change of pace and to also have the opportunity to assist patrons in person.

Yesterday, I helped locate relevant materials for a patron conducting some research about the history of Finnish Studies and scholarship related to Finland at Indiana University.  Dina had done the actual research on the question, and had identified boxes with folders related to the topic, and it was my job to physically find the folders, present them to the patron with some basic contextual information about the collection to which they belonged, and generally attend to any questions or requests that the patron had.  I was glad that I got asked to help in this way because I enjoy attending to patrons.  For any department of a library that interacts with patrons, it is absolutely essential, I feel, to establish a friendly, attentive, and accommodating manner of service, and I was glad that I was able to contribute in this way at the archives.

Additionally, I have been working on creating a basic folder list for an accession of papers donated by Denis Sinor, a former professor of Central Asian Studies at IU.  The term accession refers to a set of records received from one individual or organization at one specific time.  At an archival repository, records are organized according to accession number prior to their being processed.  Since backlogs of unprocessed records often exist, it is important to create some sort of record of the material contained in an unprocessed collection.  That way, archivists can identify records that are useful to a specific topic even if they belong to an unprocessed collection.