April activities more than slow budding of flowers

Okay – I am continuing this journal from my last entry as if no time as passed because it hasn’t. I just had to get that first part posted because I am so busy I can barely stop to keep the record of what I am doing but it is important to do. And I must get my thoughts down before more things happen….because they do keep happening. Just when we think the path is straight we get thrown a curve ball.

Space was a big curve ball in the previous entry. More weeding required, more creative thinking, more use of space “up top”. So Elsalyn requested a step ladder with thoughts towards how we will reach this crows nest of storage.

Another realization for me is that new books and donations are constantly coming. This is a dynamic environment. New books are cataloged and then put on display a top the filing cabinets so they can be “seen” before being relegated to the shelves. New book on New Jersey Baseball being ordered (2 copies – one for circulating). Very important to have this book as the author has been asked to speak at the annual Friends Dinner in June. The books will likely be signed by the author at that time. Also purchased the 2 Volume Encyclopedia of New Jersey. 2 copies also purchased of new book “Murders in Monmouth” and “Railroads of Monmouth County”. I went to hear the author of “Murders in Monmouth” speak at a local Borders store. He is incredibly friendly, works at the Monmouth County Library in the Art Dept, did his research at the Monmouth County Archives where I got my start and he is very eager to do speaking engagements as he loves to speak about his book. What could be better? Line up a program! I am finding the network of local authors is very small and very friendly. Everyone knows each other! Helen Pike, a lecturer at SCILS (in Communication) and author of several local books, did a great presentation last month at Monmouth Genealogy Society on getting published. I digress here. Suffice to say that my time in the Local History room is having benefits I never dreamed of.

Back to work.

Other items coming in need donation sheets – these items are valuable, or old, and become the property of the library after donation. We have to decide whether we can keep the item on display or store it away. If it is stored, how do we keep track of it? That is getting ahead of my internship but something Elsalyn and I speak about regularly. At a minimum, the location of the item is written on the donation sheet so we have some idea of where things are.

One recent donation was the picture of the first female postmistress of Long Branch – Ida Scholes or Showles. The date is unknown but the roads are dirt, the carriage is horse drawn and the clothing seems turn of the century. I’m sure there are web sites that use clothing to date pictures…..I’ll have to take a look in my spare time….. The interesting anecdote about this donation is that Elsalyn thought this woman looked familiar and she went rummaging in another collection of photos and pulled out a group photo of several postmasters and postmistresses. Elsalyn had remembered this photo existed somewhere in the Local History room and made the connection. Without a consultant/librarian overseeing a collection, this type of “connecting of the dots” would not happen. These two photos that link together (but have different spellings of the name and require further research) might never have been pulled together.

We have a second Microfilm machine now. 2 researchers can be researching 100 years of newspaper history at one time. This is great because we have a diligent volunteer who is always on one machine…..other people can get some viewing time now too.

Upcoming events. I am scheduled to attend a free all day workshop offered by NJSL and run by NEDCC on Preservation. This fits in perfectly with the internship. Last October I took the workshop on Disaster Planning, also run by the same group. It was a great day so I am looking forward to this upcoming event in May. I am also looking forward to the History and Preservation Section programs at NJLA. Of course, I am also looking forward to the Reference Section programs. My loyalty is split since I am the Student at Large on the Reference Section Board and I am interested in both sections events.

Other Local events that are coming up should be attended by the Local History Librarian. My time at LB as a volunteer may or may not come to end but someone should attend events held, for example, by the Long Branch Historical Association. The Slocum Murder evening program will be April 30^th and will be at Boro Hall in LB. We usually get a representative from LBHA coming to the library’s programs, so reciprocation is important.

Another thing that would have been nice for me to do and should be done by the local history librarian is putting a tidbit of history in the local paper each month. While I was working on Outreach I had to get news about the library’s programs in to the newspapers – I could have taken advantage of the time and maybe pulled some local history information. But that is not part of my internship and there wasn’t time in my work hours to cover the research. Also, it might have required that the local paper and I setup a schedule and set aside some space for the “monthly history corner” or some such space. But certainly food for thought for future work and publicity possibilities.

Cataloging problem that is a holdover from the conversion to SIRSI system. An anonymous MARC record has as many as 50 sub entries – books that couldn’t be easily converted because a MARC record didn’t exist that books could be attached to. It costs $10 to create a new MARC record so many of these unique reference books were relegated to the anonymous MARC with I’m sure the intent to resolve it once everything was up and running. But guess what – no one ever had time to go back, find the books, find the records, recatalog them as appropriate. So if a patron comes in looking for a book on Healey Poetry for example, the Long Branch copy is not in the catalog. It is not searchable by title – but they own it. And if someone could pull all the books in this limbo status and fix them it would be great. Another job for a volunteer……

Glassine folder from Gaylord. These are archival folders for photographs. We have a pretty good supply of materials in the Local History Room thanks to the forethought of Elsalyn. She has a good relationship with the staff at LB so asks for supplies whenever she needs them.

“Artifacts” - Long Branch Marathon T Shirts were in archival box. NOT the sort of thing the Local History has room for. Great material for a display since the next marathon is coming up. We gave these T Shirts to the director and kept any paper record of the marathon for the collection.

I thought I was going into April with my foot on the brake....

Journal – finishing up March moving into April and some serious decision making

The internship is getting harder – or perhaps more thought provoking is a better way to say it. It is an iterative process. Revisiting decisions and changing them when appropriate. If I was forced to stick with all the previous decisions I might have been frozen by fear of making mistake. But in fact we made decisions as necessary to move forward, discovered new things and found better ways to describe, order, label or organize the information. An onion or artichoke of a project.

One change has become clear that could only have occurred when we reached this point of filing away all the boxes of paper. We don’t have enough room. We need more filing cabinets to store the collections but there is no room, nor are there any spare filing cabinets around. Elsalyn is rapidly rethinking the design of the room and her collections. Should Library Archives remain downstairs in Reference and what other material might be combined there? How can the collections be logically organized so they are easily accessed and described so people can find things easily.? We are mainly concerned with the materials in the vertical files. Material that will be housed separately in acid free boxes will definitely remain in the Local History Room. But perhaps the Long Branch Library and City of Long Branch part of the Elsalyn Palmisano Collection will be moved to filing cabinets in the Reference area, freeing up space in the local history room for some expansion of the Monmouth County and New Jersey Collection. This makes sense since the Library archives are stored in Reference and the newspaper clipping files of Long Branch are stored in Reference.

We’ve been doing a little peeking at some of the other collections that need processing. BIG MISTAKE! So tempting to take things out and look for treasures. This material has been stored for years and never processed. It is all manuscript or photographic material with a few unrelated books thrown in. Future volunteer work for my spare time!

Speaking of unrelated: We have seen the importance of a clear mission statement several times in the past few weeks. Both with recent donations and with some of the items we uncovered while exploring the older treasures. You can’t keep everything and you can’t accept everything that is offered. I’ve mentioned before that books were sold that weren’t part of the mission of the special collection and this money was used to improve the room. As mentioned above we have a space problem. You want to keep anything that improves the collection and maintains the focus of Long Branch, Monmouth County, New Jersey. But it is imperative that ownership of an item is transferred from the donor so the library has every right to sell anything that doesn’t enhance the collection. Sometimes duplicate items provide an opportunity to select the better item, antique books are fun but might be better appreciated in a different collection. Photographs need special care – too many unknown photos just create a storage problem.

And more iterations of naming conventions. We are making more decisions about folder titles and even about the best way to go about quickly labeling several hundred folders. Teamwork helps. One person reads and the other one types. It is much quicker than handwriting a list by yourself. And more fun and interactive. The fun begins when the “discussions ensue”.

One thing EP mentioned that would be important to store away for future reference is her hindsight shared with me the other day. The Elsalyn Palmisano Collection covers all of Monmouth County and all of New Jersey. Instead of creating folders as we uncover material and wondering if we already had a folder for this subject or geographic area, EP would have made a list of municipalities and counties in the region and automatically setup a folder for each one. This way we would know we have a folder for any material and any new material would already have a folder. These folders would be part of the Finding Aid and Authority List and would not have to added later. The prework would have saved some effort later. But we didn’t think of it.