Archival Practicum
- Nathan Herald
- Mar 17, 2024
- 2 min read
For the Fall 2023 semester, I participated in my Archives Practicum. I was able to work with our local university here in Grand Junction. My supervisor, Amber D'Ambrosio, is the Archives and Special Collections Librarian for Colorado Mesa University and works in the Tomlinson Library on campus.
This was a difficult project for me, as right as the semester was starting, I left my job of 11 years in a wholesale warehouse and became a school administrator for a Waldorf-inspired public school. The position I was hired for was new, and I had to clean up all of the registration files for incoming students, as they were not handled over the summer.
Aside from the work drama, I finally managed to spend a lot of time working my way through the Library of Congress Subject Heading listings, as well as become better acquainted with ContentDM, which is a major tool in archival practices. While I didn't physically handle any documents, I spent many hours cleaning up and restructuring the metadata for the William H. Nelson papers on Colorado Water. Nelson was a reporter in Grand Junction, and eventually was appointed to a federal position in the Department of Interior. The prior "archivist" received the documents and scanned them into the system, but did little due diligence in ensuring the metadata was reflective of the actual documents.
This process really taught me to slow down and carefully examine artifacts that are part of the archival record. I came to understand just how fragile digital records can be, and the dangers in not properly ensuring their storage and continued access. I also learned that in any archiving process, it's best to create a file with the specific vocabulary or formatting that the archivist(s) determine will be used.
Below is both the journal I kept through the entire process, including missteps and musings, and the vocabulary file I created and continues to be used when updating metadata on this archive.
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