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!