I am truly one of the lucky ones, as I wanted an archivist job and found one in June 2010 at the DeKalb History Center in Decatur, GA.  I had volunteered and interned there, so I knew and like everyone, so when the archivist job came up, I was kindly called! It is a lot of work, but I LOVE it.

In December 2009, I was hired as a digital preservation contractor to scan documents for Ancestry.com from the Georgia Archives building. I was excited because I had interned at the Georgia Archives, taken the 2-week Archives Institute there, and had been volunteering in the conservation lab since September.  So I know everyone there and really like it, but now I will get paid!

I have been preserving 1890s tax digests from all of the Georgia counties at the time, and incoming correspondence to the Governor of Georgia at the time of the American Civil War, Joseph E. Brown. These will eventually be up on Ancestry.com.  Here is one I really liked.



John S. Rowland was working hard to protect railroad bridges and he enclosed this map to show what he'd been busy doing.  This is from the 1860s and is still in great shape! 

Here I am scanning those huge, dusty tax digests. I dug out my old huge chef's jacket to protect my clothing from the dust...did a great job too.



Here is a bit about what I did at the Georgia Archives, along with a couple of pictures of the lab.  I sincerely thank Georgia Archives for allowing
me to take some pictures! 

        

        

We were making boxes for a set of books from the late 1700s called the Scottish Nation, all about families of the time.  These are sometimes called drop spine, clamshell or double tray boxes.  There are many tools you need to do a good job including bone folders, rulers, weights and wheat paste.  The weights are used to ensure the glue makes a tight bond.

  A very good fit!

   

Next, rivets are inserted for the cord to go through.  You use a pretty big needle and thick cotton thread, coated with a bit of sewing was to prevent fraying.

   

Once the cord is insered, you carefully glue a piece of paper on the inside of the box to secure it for good.  Then it is time to glue the two halves of the box
together, placing glass plates between the box and the weight, just in case some glue gets out, and also to ensure a secure adhesion for the glue by
distributing the weight evenly.

   

Here is the box finished, with the tied threaded under the plastic grommet disks.  It fits!  The ties are trimmed a bit so they don't get caught.



  
Another job I worked on was to take old coroner's records that had been folded for decades, putting them in a humidifying chamber so that they can be flattened and transcribed by a patron. The chamber is a huge shallow metal sink that we put soaked blotter paper in, then suspend the documents and cover the whole thing with plastic grids.  In a couple of hours, we take them out and press them under large pieces of fabric and felt to flatten them completely.

  

On the left, my fellow volunteer Rebecca is unfolding corners of the old documents to ensure complete flattening.  We sometimes use
glass plates to flatten things that have been folded up for a long time.  Glass is a good material to use, as any stains on the paper are less
likely to stick to glass, and if they do, it is a bit easier to remove.

  

I helped to set up a small exhibit on the Works Progress Administration in the late summer and soon it was time to take it down to make way for a new exhibit.  We went behind the display cases, as you can see on the left, and carefully removed the items.  You must wear gloves and a lab coat to prevent dust and fingerprints!

Preserving video and audio is also important, and while volunteering at the Atlanta History Center, I digitized many 1/4" audio tapes.  These tapes were part of a folklore collection that was created as part of a folklore class taught at Georgia State University.  The tapes I digitized were from the 1960s and had wonderful stories, songs and life remembered by those living then. The collection is huge and I made digital files of the tapes and chose audio clips that will be used online eventually.

While at the DeKalb History Center, I started a project to digitize an oral history collected called the I Remember Hour, interviewing DeKalb County residents about life in DeKalb County through the years.  Due to my television background, I also took the DVD/VCR combination machine apart for regular cleaning.  The collection consisted of approximately 130 VHS tapes from as far back at the 1980s, and a couple of 1/4" audio tapes from the 1970s.  The VHS tapes were in varying shape, but most were still fairly stable.  Every so often I would run into a blue or green video however!  It is a good thing to have these invaluable materials on DVDs as a step towards more permanent preservation.

I also learned many great things while in school.  I learned XHTML by building a website for a real client, put together a strategic plan for a fictitious academic law library, put together museum collections in Pachyderm and OpenCollection and built the Nuts About Georgia! digital library, serving as project manager for my group. You can find examples of my web work here:

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