Finishing the Black Albums

First thing this morning, I photographed each page of my second black album for the catalog record. After uploading all of the photos onto the computer, I continued cropping and rotating them one by one (between the two albums, about 320 photos). As you will recall from yesterday's post, I also had to save each photo in a high resolution TIFF file and as a much smaller file for the ANCS+ record. I finished that process in the early afternoon.

Photographing one of the black albums

After finishing with the photos, I was finally able to begin my catalog records in ANCS+. I pasted my catalog entry from Microsoft Word into the description field and uploaded photos of each page into the database for each of my two albums. When I finished the catalog records, the only thing left to do was interleave every page in the albums with sheets of acid-free paper. Upon completing this, I put the albums in their boxes and back into storage. The HRC was required to finish cataloging 10 albums by the end of the fiscal year (in September), and we completed 8 of them during these past two weeks. One of the interns will probably be cataloging one more because he will be here a few weeks longer than the rest of us, so the staff is confident (and extatic!) that they will meet their goal.

Interleaving an album with acid-free paper

After finishing the album, I tied up a few loose ends before discussing the exhibit with Bridget and the other museum interns. Now that the albums are completed, we are going to be focusing on the exhibit for the rest of the summer. First we will take down the current exhibit (which they may be doing tomorrow, but I have the day off because my brother is coming for a visit). Then, we will be choosing objects for our new cases (on early park administration), writing labels, etc.