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It has been quite the experience working with the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation! I was planning on spending my summer first on May term in Scotland followed by attending a field school in Malta. Obviously, due to COVID I did not get to participate in those plans. That really bummed me out in the beginning of the summer. Finding an internship was the last thing I wanted to do considering that I was supposed to have an amazing summer learning abroad. When I heard about this internship at the foundation I was thankful for the opportunity, especially because I have requirements to fill before I graduate, but I didn’t realize how much the experience would mean to me. I was received by the most supportive supervisor I could have asked for and she made me realize the job I was being asked to do was extremely important and the work I was going to be doing would be appreciated by a lot of people. It was a massive collection but I went into it confident that I could get a huge chunk of it done if not all of it, which was really important for me to do. I had to go into it with a good attitude. My supervisor had jobs of her own to do so she couldn’t be back in the room I was working in inside the library all the time with me going through every document with me. Every time I have ever done a big project I have kind of had someone standing there guiding me along, but she was trusting me to be able to handle and organize an important collection almost on my own. I couldn’t second guess myself every time I was a little unsure. I really ended up learning that I was capable of having good ideas about how to handle the collection and that my supervisor was acting as more of a collaborator than a boss and really listened to the things I said. I finally grew confident that I was making the right organizational choices. Another thing that I really loved about working here over the past month and some is that I learned so so so much about Roanoke. I grew up here and realized I knew so little about the history of the city. I basically started driving around Roanoke and realizing that I had just organized a folder about the building sitting right in front of me at a red light. I started recognizing the names of people who have built up this community. I just in all feel that I know so much more about where I am from and the things that have gone into preserving the most historic aspects of it. That was really cool for me.

 

Before, I mentioned going to field school in Malta for ethnography. I really do want to focus on anthropological studies in the future, but learning what goes into preservation and making sure historians and researchers have access to the past has really opened my eyes. The extreme care that you have to put into preserving just one photograph or one piece of paper is really interesting and having to do that work has definitely made me more appreciative as a historian in general. Archives don’t just appear for me to search. They have to be handled first and taken care of so that people will be able to access important information for a long time. I am very grateful for my time at the foundation, and have really enjoyed helping them finish a major project. I feel very accomplished and having my supervisor be proud of my work meant the world to me.

It has been a very busy last week at RVPF trying to tie up loose ends and get some final organization done. Every day I have gotten a great amount done as I know this is my last week. Today my supervisor and I went through half of the folders I have completed (there are about 200 in total if I remember correctly, I will get more definite figures after my final day tomorrow) and alphabetized them, classified them by series and sub-series, and stuck them into their final resting boxes! That was extremely satisfying, because I got to throw away a lot of sticky notes with “?” on them. I was very grateful I did this with her because she knows a lot more about the sites I am making files for and we can work together on how to classify them so that a researcher would find what they were looking for with no problem. Tomorrow I will finish going through and organizing the rest of those files of documents that I have put together over my time at the foundation. I also plan to make a list of everything that will need attention still after my time comes to an end working on the collection for the foundation. I want to make exactly sure that I do everything I can up until the last minute, so I won’t know until tomorrow exactly how much I will be leaving for them to finish up, but with the way things went today, I do believe truly that I will have everything organized into files for them by the time I leave. About 35% of the file folders I  have created, while organized by subject, have not yet had things like staples and paperclips attended to. I have mentioned in previous blog posts that I have to take care that the document it properly secured in a way that will preserve the paper over long periods of time and I also have to sort it chronologically. News clippings and photographs, as mentioned before, are also things that take up a lot of time to properly preserve and annotate. It is very time consuming, but I decided the best way to use my time over my last week was to make sure everything was organized into its series and sub-series and get all the piles and boxes of papers organized. I am almost there and really think I can achieve that goal by the time I leave tomorrow, only leaving them with the job of taking care of the paper and photograph preservation. It will be much easier once it is organized to go through, so that is what I have been doing. I attached a picture of the files I finished today and another picture of all the boxes that I have gotten rid of that had paper in them that I organized over my time here! It has been quite the week!

Although it is my last week at my internship, I still have a lot to keep me busy. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have started to move on to organizing different kinds of things and more taking my own direction in the way I organize them. I have a lot of miscellaneous documents that need homes and classification. I have been working mostly with things that have already been somewhat organized, therefore I really didn’t have to read through every piece of paper to figure out what it pertained to. Now, with this portion of my project it is up to me to read through each document and determine  where it should belong. I really have had to put myself in a future researchers shoes that will be viewing the collection I am working on to figure out the best way to organize all this information. I am trying to think about the researchers and historians in the future that will need to look through these documents, therefore I am trying to label and organize everything in a way that will be easy to navigate and find information. I am working now with a lot more of the documentation of internal happenings within the foundation, making files for things such as annual board meetings, treasurers report, and (more) correspondence among many other things. Before I was largely handling documentation on historic sites the foundation has preserved. I have gotten a lot better at having a system of things, so that makes me a lot more efficient. I have attached pictures of the rest of the documents I have left to organize and the kind of files I am organizing them into. It is kind of like doing a big puzzle and every little thing fits into a certain place. Sometimes its easier to tell and sometimes its harder to tell what should belong where, but when I am in doubt I just make a separate file for it. I am almost 100% confident that I can finish all of the organization of this collection in my last week at the foundation. I am super happy with my progress so far!

After this week it will have been a month since I started to spend my time working with the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation. I have accomplished a lot! I am going to try to explain what I have done and what I will spend the rest of my time doing in a way that makes sense without actually seeing the collection I am working on. I found out that the foundation has been around since 1988, and while I had noticed that 1988 seemed to be the earliest date on any of the material I have been working with, I had more assumed that I was just dealing with a collection from 1988 on. Out of this entire collection it is up to me to group every piece of paper that has ever been saved or filed away by the foundation. I explained this in my last blog post, but getting a little more in depth is necessary to explain the roll I will continue to play at my internship. The first week I spent going through their entire file box of correspondence (which consisted of letters, mail, cards, emails, etc) and sorting it by year in new files. For every paper clip I saw I removed it with a special tool and replaced it with a paper clip over a piece of paper, as mentioned previously. Then, it took me about two weeks to get through the entire history of every historic site that they have ever worked to preserve that was given a file. This was the same process as the correspondence was, but it just took a very long time to get through the sheer amount of paper that was in those files, sort it chronologically, and organize it based on series and subseries. Now that I am finally done with that I am moving on to alllllllll the miscellaneous things, papers, articles, pictures, slides, and much more that the foundation has acquired over its time. THIS is the monster of the job, says my boss. Whereas what I was working on before was time consuming and repetitive, this portion of the job requires me to read through every piece of paper and decide where to organize it-and let me say…there is a lot. Everything I was working with before was already organized into their own little category. Over the  next week and a half I am going to work as hard as I can to get completely through the collection or come as close as I can. I will update with what kind of fun things I come across as my days will now be a little more diverse in content. I have attached a picture of the room I work in! It is in the historic Gainsboro Library and it is a room named after Virginia Y Lee, the fourth librarian at the library. In the picture you can get a glimpse of just how much paper I am working with!

At this point I have been working with the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation since the 7th. It has been a great couple weeks so far. I am working on a collection of a plethora of the foundation’s records. It is my job to get boxes on boxes of paper organized into different series, sub-series, and folders that correspond to a google doc to keep track of it all. In fact, one of the most challenging things in the end of my project will be how to decide to actually organize everything after I have it all of the records in their respective folders. I need to figure out how it would best make sense to navigate once the collection ends up in its home in the Virginia Room archives. Each piece of paper in each folder must be arranged chronologically and if there is any kind of staple or paper clip on the paper it must be removed and replaced with a small strip of paper and a new paper clip over it to keep those together. If there is a photograph or a news article it is my job to photocopy that and preserve the photograph in a special sleeve. Those photographs have a series of their own, and have their own specific markings that I must write on the back that correspond to the digitized portion of the collection I mentioned earlier for the convenience of researchers in the future. It may sound a little complicated, but I finally have it down. My supervisor says it is enough work to keep an intern busy for 3-4 months, due to the size of the collection, but I am making headway and hope to see it all the way through or get very close by the end of my time with the Preservation Foundation. I am doing all of my work in the Gainsboro Public Library, which is chalk full of  history in itself. It is a beautiful building and makes for great surroundings while I am working on the collection.

 

I was supposed to also produce a series of videos highlighting people in our community who have saved historical sights from demolition. However, due to COVID we have removed that part of my project to keep both me and the subjects of my would have been interviews safe.  I certainly have enough on my plate without this project, but I do regret not being able to meet avid preservationists through the interviews I was supposed to do. Things are going great so far working on the collection, and I can’t wait to see how much I accomplish!