Week 36: Selection and Privacy

Processing the personal financial records of a collection can become a little tricky, especially for a “living donor.”  I found several income financial statements, personal tax returns, and personal bank checks concerning the revenue earned by O’Neal. Since O’Neal is still alive, and I want to respect is privacy, I will consult with managerial staff and Mr. O’Neal regarding the selection of materials in this series. 

Until next week!

Peace!

Week 35: Tell Me A Story, Sing Me a Song

This week I contributed to Amistad’s e-newsletter by writing an article about O’Neal and I continued to process O’Neal’s papers. The papers are almost complete (Yay!).  

I am working diligently to arrange and describe the Other Materials section of the papers, which is one of the largest series of the collection. An interesting find in this series include files for Tell Me A Story, Sing Me A Song, a three-day celebration of oral history and cultural identity. The traveling performance festival presented the works of the Free Southern Theater, the Roadside Theater, A Traveling Jewish Theatre, and El Teatro Campesino, and weaved together the best of Appalachian, Southern Black, urban Jewish, and Latino cultural traditions. The traveling group toured and performed at several universities such as Xavier University and the Stone Center for the Performing Arts at Jacksonville State University. 

Next week I will complete this series and process the Financial Records Series, another small series of O’Neal’s papers.

Week 34: Technology and Archives

Amistad Research Center hosted a tour of fifty freshmen students from New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). The students toured the new exhibition gallery, talked to the reference archivist about the Center's holdings, and walked upstairs to the processing area to view documents from our ongoing projects.  I showed the students two program booklets from plays that were produced by O'Neal and mentioned various types of correspondence included in his collection.  The students were intrigued and asked about saving emails and what steps are taken to save and to provide access to audio visual materials.

Their questions made me ponder how technology in archives is very relevant to students in the 21^st century. Although I believe both paper and electronic resources are equally important for researchers, I question, do students or people in general, still write and send letters to their love ones? What measures must archivists and information professionals take to make sure that communications, either in paper or electronic format, are saved for future access?

With a little research, I found a class on the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA) website titled, Achieving E-mail Account Preservation with XML that addresses the NOCCA student's email question. I am very interested in attending this course once it becomes available – to answer their questions of course.