Week 8/9

By now I should hopefully be over halfway done with this project.

Here’s my checklist currently:

Inventory
completed: (separate documents organized by shipment # and by type of item: EP Works, Other Artists Works, Manuscript Transfers, Book Transfers)

Housing
completed: drawings
to be completed: prints (40%)
estimated time to complete: 6 hours
   
Accessioning
completed: drawings
to be completed: EP prints; other artist’s works; artists books
estimated time to complete: 12-14 hours

Finding Aid
completed: biographical sketch
to be completed: scope note, contents; appendices (25%)
estimated time to complete: 10-12 hours

Week 7

I have been moving right along with accessioning with very few issues (not including potentially missing/not sent items).

But before I could get too deeply into that process, I needed to step back and get my inventory files clear and readily understandable to the HRC Art Collection staff and the donor of the collection. Because the collection was sent in 3 different shipments over the course of the last few years there have been multiple people with their hands in it, and the records display this often confusing jumble.  The artists/collector seems to also have different people assisting her with arranging and shipping the materials, so her inventory lists differ in both presentation and details included.  Unravelling this documentation to understand what is in the collection and when it was sent has been a long process for me, and this next week I hope to have inventories finished.

Week 6

A few weeks ago, I had been given a new finding aid template, but on closer inspection it did not seem like it was really going to work for a predominately art collection finding aid.  There was two columns to describe the collection: container number and description.  In the Art Collection more columns are definitely appreciated when you need to include accession numbers, dates, medium, titles etc.  After talking with the art cataloguer about how this is going to work, she started talking with the archivist and learned that the art collection can just ignore the updated finding aid template and stick with what they have been already doing!  I’m very happy with this development as it solves the issue of what order to put those descriptive elements, and having column again will make it easier to transfer the information I already have typed out in spreadsheets for every item.  This will definitely decrease my workload in that respect.

This week I also wrote the biographical sketch for the artist/collector.  I tried to look for some articles written about her and in the journals she published in, but quickly realized that they all had used information that EP herself had written.  So instead I looked to the books she published herself and her website to find the information I needed and piece it together chronologically and thematically.

I hope to hear back from EP by next week about some inconsistencies in the records, so that I can begin accessioning.