What I did this week – 12/10, 12/11
Now that finals are over, I was able to devote most of two days to the project. I focused on finishing with the glass-plate negatives, and I am happy to say that I am nearly done! In fact, I might as well be done; the negatives are in their new enclosures and are ready to sit in a box for another 20 years. (Just kidding!)
Here are the negatives sitting pretty in their nice new boxes. The box on the left holds Negative #001 - Negative #090, the middle one holds Negative #091 - Negative #190 and the box on the right holds Negative #191 - Negative #267.
A finished list of the Negatives, including their original titles, dates, and any notes along with their new filing number can be found here.
One of the benefits SPU gets out of my doing this project is that I am cutting down on needed space. The picture on the right shows the blue box that the negatives were originally housed in. The small boxes on the left are what they will be living in from now on. Quite a difference! In archiving, space = money. It usually costs more to store lots of things, and any way that you can consolidate the items in a collection is a step towards saving some cash.
The last two negatives in the box were bigger than the rest, so I had to improvise. I ended up cutting an archival folder into pieces, and making a bigger version of the enclosures. You can see the difference in shape and color here.
I still need to insert the photocopies I made on archival paper into the enclosures with the negatives. (Don’t remember me doing that? Click here.) That should not take very long at all, especially since I was almost able to finish cutting all the paper.
On the left is a negative inside the enclosure. On the right is a photocopy of the original envelope on top of the negative inside the enclosure. All of the envelopes that CWP wrote on will be included with the negative.
Here are the Before and After shots of Box #1:
Before After
It may not look like a big difference at first, but trust me, the box is a lot lighter now!
Over the Christmas holiday, I plan on writing most, if not all, of the apologetic for archiving. This is the part that will explain the value of archives and why (or why not) SPU ought to keep CWP’s old things. When I come back to school at the beginning of the new year, I will post an update on how far I really got on the paper. Have a great holiday!