Week 4

To follow up on last week's visit with an archivist at the institution, I have requested some books to get acquainted with archival methodology and practices.  I also had another conversation with him about ways of presenting information about publications and poems in the collection, while still maintaining the focus on the artworks.  I will be looking for institutional finding aid examples to see if there is a collection that is a hybrid of art and manuscript or book items, and if so maybe gleaming some organization ideas from it.  If not, I will likely be using indices at the end at the finding aid to tie the poems and books to the art items.
Most of this week was spent trying to find the best ways to display these various connections between poems, books, and art in the collection.  Often a single print in the collection can be related to a proof, another print, a poem, and a publication.  Making those connections easy to understand and read may be the most important and time consuming element of creating this finding aid.  While EP did provide a lot of documentation for the collection items, sometimes particularly when it involves the text of her poems, tracing the connections can involve some extra thought and time with the items.  Despite this I hope to soon move from beginning inventory lists to accessioning the art items into the collection.