Went back up to Maine last week to see family and enjoy some time off. 2013 has been an awesome year so far filled with a new internship at a natural history education center, trips to art museums in New York and Ottawa, and getting ready for an upcoming literary conference presentation at the end of April. Stay tuned for more posts to come!
Loads of unsorted boxes, a new archive, new methods, and plenty of coffee for fuel. Now what?
The picture above is a glimpse into a records collection from Musical Theatre North (MTN), a Potsdam, NY-based performing arts company in business from 1979 to the mid-1990s. I’m processing the collection during an internship at SUNY Potsdam Archives and Special Collections. Previous posts from Maine Historical Society’s technical services documented my first excursion into the world of archives. This new experience will be more of a honing in on developing archival techniques and tricks of the trade related to arranging unsorted collections, rather than starting from the ground up with no pre-existing experiences like last time up in Maine. That was tricky.
I learned from the Maine Historical Society internship that it’s a wise move to go through all the paper materials in a collection before diving into the processing aspect. From first glance, this collection was already in a pretty decent order with little to no fishing around inside the boxes necessary. Most of the collection included scrapbooks, Umatic cassettes, slides, and a few folders of photographic negative strips. Overall, it was pretty self-explanatory as far as arrangement went.
Until I got to the photographic images part. The photos were in some form of order, but for the most part there were plenty thrown about with no particular dates attached to them. This is when I figured the lengthy part of the re-housing process would be arranging the photographic hodgepodge.
Then there were these things! 35mm Polaroid slides. I’ve never heard of or seen these before. Luckily, they were already in slip covers and organized by date, save for a few stragglers, ready to be put into archival quality folders.
The photos, not so much. I realized there were two categories to work with as far as content went: production and non-production. Every photo either included images of off-stage shenanigans (workshops, parades) and the other end of the spectrum were solely musicals they did on-stage. Little by little I picked away at the piles and came up with a series that adheres to the photos’ original order as well as the two categories that emerged.
The one on the left is three days of processing, not bad compared to the state those photos were in.
A few articles I’ve been assigned by my mentor discuss the importance of original order in a collection because of the record originator’s intent. Often times, the originator’s intent was to have these documents laid out in a certain way, other times (such as with legal documents from a busy law firm) the collection is chucked around in boxes then donated to an archive with little to no order. I believe the reason behind the former is because the donor of the collection is the most familiar with the material, so there is a method to their madness. The instances of document chaos is where archivists come in to best arrange it for researchers.
The most valuable lesson I’ve taken away so far from my experience is that a collection doesn’t necessarily have to be in complete re-housing condition to be accesible to researchers. An interesting article by Mark Greene discusses MPLP, (More Product, Less Process)which is a framework for processing collections in an efficient way when they can’t necessarily be fully processed by an inevitably overwhelmed archives staff. MPLP is a great way to make backlog (unprocessed stuff) open for use, but I’m finding can also be applied to regular processing.
For instance, one doesn’t have to removed every last paperclip from a collection because it’ll be stored in a controlled environment. Instead, more focus should be devoted to the series arrangement, or duplicates in a collection. This is what I’m finding to be most useful with re-housing and certainly has been working out well. Friday, when I go back for another round of archival goodness, will hold more challenges, let’s see what comes out of the boxes next.
Filed under SUNY Potsdam Archives Internship 2012
I like finding quick gigs that are outside my comfort zone. Whilst rummaging through bookjobs.com I stumbled upon a posting for a freelance proofreader at an indie publisher. Figure as an English major with plenty of what I believed was sufficient proofreading experience, this would be a snap to nab.
Not exactly, but I learned new things along the way.
Come to find out there were plenty of aspects of proofreading I was oblivious to. After firing over my resume and throwing in bits about the publisher that I read in Publisher’s Weekly (brownie points!) the managing editor sent me a proofreading test that entailed both copyediting and gramatical proofreading. This was a nice confidence booster because I figured that plenty of people applied to the job.
Quick lesson: copyediting is how the page looks (word alignment, typeface, etc.) and proofreading is the grammatical aspect (punctuation, spelling, etc.). Editing is completely different because it deals with wording and authorial voices, usually the final step after excruciating proofreading and copyediting work.
The editing test called for Chicago Manual of Style standards. This style guide is a colossal bible of citation developed by scholars at the University of Chicago. The free version is linked below and is really helpful for history research, but the library copy I dug up had some really insightful proofreading examples on top of citation guidelines.
After pouring over the guide’s proofreading chapters—and making three waves of proofreading drafts on the two pages that were given to me—I sent in the final copy. Unfortunately, a more experienced proofreader got the job, but I was happy to have been given the opportunity to try out for the position. I had treated it as just a trial to see how it would go from the start so there would be little disappointments. The best part is that I was only a few short copyediting errors away from being at par!
I learned during the whole ordeal that job hunters are somewhat programmed to do the usual firing out of an equipped resume and cover letter to a handful of employers, hoping for the best of it with not too much effort. What this taste of the job search taught me is that a little personality, such as knowing about the publisher’s recent merger and mentioning it, along with showing a curiosity for the subject matter is what got me a reply back.
Going outside my comfort zone and career focus was a nice feeling as I see status updates pour in from recent graduates about the seemingly dismal job hunt. Maybe job seekers perceptions of reality have changed instead of the actuality. Heck, if a junior year English major can get pretty close to landing a gig with little to no experience, how bad can it really be for those with the experience? I still wish those scrambling for employment the best of luck.
Here’s the free Chicago Manual of Style guide!
Cheers!
Vincent Dubay
Filed under The life pursuit
I’m a huge Jack Kerouac fanboy. For those unfamiliar with the frequently praised godfather of the Beat generation, check out his extremely popular novel On the Road. I’m warning you readers now that this is the novel which sparked thousands of angel headed hipsters to jump in a ’49 Ford hudson and drive coast to coast. If anything though, you’ll develop a new love for John Coltrane records and chuck taylors.
Anyways, I stumbled upon a photo the other day of him holding a cat which made me chuckle. Seeing an author who I’ve taken as seriously as a heart attack with a feline friend was pretty funny. Isn’t it interesting seeing our idols in a different light? Could be good or bad, but either way looking at those we put on a pedestal in their everyday life reminds us that they are at our level, human.
I’ve come across two sets of images that feature both authors and movie stars in their actual life, not the idealized one. Via flavorwire is an article about serious writers doing not so serious things. Hemingway kicking a beer can? Awesome! Wolff and Vonnegut on a lifeguard chair? Even better. The same forerunners of the English language who pumped out masterpieces of literature have their funny moments for sure.
From an imgur post, this photo of Johnny Cash and Ray Charles cracks me up! I don’t know what Cash said, but it must’ve been a side splitter. The list of photos in the post include Salvador Dali, Walt Disney, and Bill Gates all in their natural repose. A nice spin on the sort of mystifying lives we tend to attach to these idols.
Humanizing those we see as demigods helps us to realize we are just like them. Although this isn’t anything too new or profound, the feeling of knowing that at one time Sting was an English major or that Mick Jagger dropped out of the London School of Economics to be in a band is crazy.
Who knows? Maybe I could learn bass and write songs about the Sahara too.
Filed under Thoughts and Ideas
In the wise words of Lil’ John, “back, back, back it up.”
Yes, turn of the decade hip hop music can teach us quite a bit about making sure our files are safe.
Tomorrow, a freak lightning strike or rouge water spout could possibly bust through your open window and wreak havoc on your computer! Don’t lose data in hard drive that goes kaput, back it up. You may have missed all the freebies on national data back up day in March (yes it’s real) and are left without sufficient funds to dump on an external hard drive. However, thanks to the efforts of new cloud storage start-ups, there are plenty of affordable back-up clients to choose from. I’ll highlight two free ones, because free things make me all fuzzy inside.
I personally use Spideroak, a free service that provides users with two gigabytes of space. It’s a neat little application that automatically backs up files to an online cloud server directly from your computer. Spideroak’s application runs in the background amidst all your other processes and takes up barely any of your CPU, backing up files like a cloud storage ninja.
Another nifty storage client is CrashPlan. This one’s a wee bit of money for an online back-up package, but it allows you to do a free offsite back-up. Basically, if you have multiple computers on your home network you can easily back-up files from grandma’s laptop to dad’s laptop and vice versa. This keeps the data backed up around home machines, but doesn’t back it up online. The application is useful and free with options to upgrade. However, you have to make sure all of your machines don’t crap the bed at the same time. What’s really cool about CrashPlan is that it encrypts your precious documents. Even better, it’s Linux friendly!
Would you play data roulette with your two-hundred page thesis paper, landscape design plans, baby photos, or cute pictures of cats? No! Don’t take a chance on your files, back it up.
But If you do lose everything in a tragic computer crash, here’s a button for that.
Filed under Uncategorized
What? This is the name of a Chicago-based company that has been making some waves by programming algorithms to write news stories. For those unfamiliar with what algorithms are, they’re basically rules for a computer to follow when data is sent to it. Recently, narrative science gave an iphone application a handful of journalism tricks of the trade and programmed it to write sports stories. This application went to a bunch of parents who were told to input data from their child’s game. After submitting it to the application, a news story was generated in seconds. Believe it or not, the story doesn’t sound too bad.
Now before we all ditch our dreams of becoming reporters or paid writers, consider the advantage of this sort of technology. New York Times already ditched their obituary and metro section reporters ages ago because of budgeting, but the canned writer’s duties went to other staff members. If a computer could write a sports story, then an obituary or metro story shouldn’t be too much more of a hassle. Not saying go and purge newspapers of all the sports, metro, and obituary writers, or even that their trade doesn’t take skills. Rather, for the papers who have ridded those positions already, implement computers to write those pieces and let other staff members have a freed-up schedule so they can start doing more investigative reporting.
Still, I have a feeling some people will be upset.
Remember that diving into the field and uncovering the story is something that the computer can’t do. Notice that I never called Narrative Science’s program a reporter. Although, it would be comical to see one of those violin playing robots asking questions at an art gallery or interviewing Oprah. That’s the beauty of the human genome in any anxieties surrounding this quasi-HAL 9000 sports writer program: we have the ability to point out the inlets of a place and time that a computer can’t quite explore.
The company is still small and hasn’t gone public yet. No contracts as far as I’ve read, but don’t be surprised if you were to see them working with small town newspapers in the future. Figure if they started with little leaguers, before we can say “Garciapara” they will be up working with the big leaguers of the newsprint trade in no time.
Filed under Thoughts and Ideas
That’s a good term for the past few weeks. My on-going experience with grad school material has been quite the undertaking and seems to have consumed everything to do with socializing during it’s totalitarian reign. However, like John Milton during the Protestant Reformation, I fell into a sea of productive exile from the outside world. While I didn’t manifest a modern day “Paradise Lost” to show for it, I did manage to spew out a hefty term paper ready for editing (lots and lots of editing).
During my periodic coffee and aspirin breaks I was either participating or presenting at an arts festival on my campus. A real treat between piles of research was meeting Grant Barrett, co-host of the NPR show “A Way with Words.” The lexicographer and author of numerous dictionaries on slang was quite the conversation at a lunch for my English department. He delivered an excellent Q&A talk on trending topics in language along with the origins of idioms, provincial accents, and foreign roots of slang words we use daily. His show on NPR is an excellent morning coffee listen and after tuning into a few episodes I’m hooked. The most entertaining part about talking with Grant was hearing his take on a wide breadth of topics on just about anything from South American cuisine to French Canadian dialects and even what was on Reddit this week. Come to find out, he was a DJ at his college too! Who knows? Maybe I’ll be on NPR someday…
I also had the honor of reading one of my short stories “Playing with Wax” at a creative nonfiction event along with a few other student writers. The event had a lot of really solid pieces and an awesome vibe during the reading. My piece was about DJing in my bedroom back in New York and I plan to make it one installment in a larger short story collection about vinyl and DJing in the digital age.
Another week down and getting closer to summer! Finally. Although I will miss the old Potsdam campus. I’ll be doing a series of posts this summer about my experiences at the camp I work at because it’s always quite the adventure.
For now, I’ll leave up this nifty photo of some really interesting stairs that combine a wheelchair ramp into its structure. Reason be, I’m on a committee that’s assisting in re-designing our library for student accessibility. My goal is keep in mind students of all capabilities, along with environmental sustainability. Our library needs more plants and ramps!
Filed under Thoughts and Ideas
