Day Eight (Tuesday, June 24)
I spent most of this day working on processing and writing the finding guide for the three boxes of articles and sketches. I was even able to complete a little bit of research in trying to figure out where some other articles fit in. I had to renumber box 1 folders. I then found another article that should have gone in box 1. I was told to place the folder where it would go in the box and put an 'a' after the number to differentiate two folders with the same number. I worked through an entire box and a half.
Day Nine (Wednesday, June 25)
I continued working on the finding guide. Once I finished working through the second half of the second box, I sat down with my supervisor to work in EAD. He got me started and showed me some basics of working with the program. As we were working we found an error and the program would not parse and validate the work. We played around with it awhile and could not figure out where the problem lay. I continued to work on the finding guide in Word. I began working my way through the 3rd box of articles and sketches. I found another article that belonged in box 2. I did the same thing I did with the article in box 1 and numbered the folder and added an 'a' to the folder number. When I get through the entire process, I will probably go back and renumber the folders in the boxes so that it is fluid. Renumbering will also work better with EAD from my understanding of the program and what little work I was able to do in EAD.
Day Ten (Thursday, June 26)
Today is the day I made an interesting discovery. I began work on the 4th box. This large box was already partially processed as another archivist had come through and removed many travel guides and maps that did not have to do with Texas. A list of items removed was on top of the box. I started going through the box with the archivist and their were several Texas State Travel Guides that we are going to remove from the collection and place with travel. As we went through the box, I found 5 large clasp envelopes at the bottom of the box. I discovered that 3 of these envelopes had early sketches from Frank Oliver when he was taking a mail-in class on art and cartooning. I knew after this discovery that my project just got extended.
Day Eleven (Friday, June 27)
I spent most of the day processing and placing the maps and guides in folders and in an archival box. I also created a Word document with a list of the items that have been removed. I organized my work and used a cart to bring it all to the front by the computer I am using. Up to this point I had been working one box at a time and walking the box to the back and getting the next box. I discovered that 2 of the clasp envelopes contained guides to the different regions of Texas that Oliver wrote about. Each guide contained 18 articles on that region. Each guide also provided a small map of where that region was located in Texas. These helped me to figure out what articles belonged in which region. I was able to add regions to several items in the finding guide. I also realized that I was going to have to rework my finding guide for series due to the discovery of the Landon Assignments and Workbooks.
Day Twelve (Saturday, June 28)
I only went in for a few hours today. I wanted to start on the envelopes that contained Oliver's early sketch work. I spent the three hours I was at the library going through the 1st folder of Landon Assignments and determining how they were to be grouped. Most of them were already grouped. I was able to place these in folders and I started box 5 of the collection.
