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.