Dallas Pen Women and J. Lawrence Jones Collection

July 15

Today I spent the morning placing the Dallas Pen Women collection into folders.  After discussing the organization of this collection with the Archivist, I tried to keep it to the original order that was in the boxes but got approval to change some wording and break up a miscellaneous folder into other series that made more sense.  I did the same with the general folder.  These two folders were broken up into other series that made more sense for what each series in the collection contained.

I also made some corrections to the Frank Oliver finding guide.  This completed the collection.  The finding guide is ready to be converted from a Word document into a PDF document and uploaded to the web.  EAD has had some issues with this finding guide which is why it was completed in Word. Eventually it will be done in EAD.  I also filed the boxes away in the archive.

July 16

Today was spent in EAD working on the finding guide for the Dallas Pen Women Collection.  I also did some research looking for information to add to the biographical note.  This collection had five different series and is contained in a single box.

As I spent time working in EAD, I tried to work on copying the finding guide for the Oliver collection.  While everything seemed to work perfectly fine for the Dallas Pen Women, it would not save any work I did on the Oliver collection.  EAD is a finicky program.

I also started a new manuscript collection today.  I began looking at the J. Lawrence Jones collection of architectural plans.  I began writing the finding guide in EAD.  I had the accession folder with a lot of information and files on what the five boxes contained.  Lawrence Oliver's grandson had written a biography.  I used this biography as the biographical note for the finding guide.  I give credit that it was written by his grandson and that I only made small edits.  This bio had been typed on a typewriter and I found typos as I was copying it into EAD.  The only corrections I made were to a few spelling and grammatical errors.  I stopped at this point because I did not want to write in the scope and contents of the collection from the lists I had that were nearly 20 years old.  I wanted to check the boxes myself.

My favorite part of the day was when my supervisor asked if I wanted to see the "Magic Kingdom".  This is the rare books held in the vault.  I saw some amazing things.  They have several first editions of famous works as well as a first and fourth folio of Shakespeare.  One of my favorite pieces was a volume of Alice in Wonderland that had been illustrated by Salvador Dali.

July 17

I spent the entire day verifying the J. Lawrence Jones collection of architectural plans.  I had a 5 page table with the plans, address if available, and the number of plans included.  I did not feel comfortable creating a finding guide without verifying that everything on the list was still in the boxes.  I did discover that there were a few items missing and one box was a big mess of mixed up items.