Internship, week of 4/23

Hit the ground running on my final week of internship. I arranged the three boxes of Gest's talks and lectures and the additional four boxes of manuscripts in chronological order. Gest was astoundingly prolific (over 300 publications in a career of over 60 years!), so it was no easy task. For all the good recordkeeping he did, there were points where he obviously stuffed a pile of papers in a folder and counted on the archives to be able to sort it out.

There's still a bit of work to be done. All the actual sorting and arrangement of the boxes is pretty well taken care of, but there's the EAD entry and MARC record and other finishing touches. I've volunteered to come in during the summer and take care of those. I can always use the experience, and I really want to be able to say that I completed the processing, not that I reached a certain point and abandoned it for someone else to pick up. Doing something 75% of the way just doesn't carry that same sense of accomplishment.

Phil tells me that Gest died within the past week (looks like maybe the 24th?). I wish I could have met him; he sounds like an amazing guy and I'm glad I had the chance to learn about him. At the same time, I probably never would have known about him if I hadn't handled this collection, and Gest did a good deal of work tracing the serendipity of scientific discoveries--the right person in the right place at the right time learning something that changed their understanding of the world. This same "serendipitous" discovery and learning process is one of the reasons I love archival work so much, so I like to think Gest would be amused at my "discovery" of him.

Internship, week of 4/16

Made some good headway on processing this week. There's a few series that Phil is not having me work with at this time, so I just needed to pull out anything relevant to other series and make sure that the remainder was properly taken care of. I've been putting some of it off toward the end after the series I was directly handling were taken care of, and this was that time. At this point there are just a few series to arrange in the proper order and I should be pretty well finished.

Internship, week of 4/9

Due to having some wisdom teeth removed on Monday, I missed my internship hours on Monday and Tuesday. However, I think the time off was good for me, as I really feel I tackled my duties with a new enthusiasm. Everything is coming together nicely for these last few weeks and I'll work some extra shifts to make up for my lost time.

The Archives dept received a very old camera recently. I'm not entirely clear on its age or origin, but I found it stunning to look at. Its really in fantastic condition, and the ability to see every angle, to reach out and touch this little piece of history... words really can't describe how much I love that. Nothing else really compares. Even in a museum you can't get this hands-on. I love how there's always something new (relatively speaking) to learn in the archives.

Internship, week of 4/2

When making the processing plan, I had assumed that much of Gest's class lectures were in the proper order, arranged by class and session. This was unfortunately not the case, as I ended up sifting through the lectures for four different classes that had all become jumbled together. Several classes had multiple folders for some sessions, making it even more difficult. In the end there was a lot of referencing the few syllabi and schedules that I could find, and even then I did a bit of educated guessing. My apologies to Gest and any future researchers who might find some of these records to still be out of order.

Article Abstracts, pt.3

Virtually all of my articles relate to privacy issues in archives, as that is a major research interest of mine. A concern in archives for some time has been "third-party" donations--correspondence and other documents that were in the possession of the donating party, but not originated by them. As technology advances, archives go online, and collections are frequently made available while the subjects are still living, the debate has become even more heated and pressing.

Gaudette, Marybeth. "Playing Fair with the Right to Privacy." Archival Issues. 28.1 (2003-2004):
21-34. Print.
Gaudette does not take prisoners in her examination and condemnation of current archival privacy standards. She finds the state of things unbearably inadequate, making the point that no two archivists will always come to the same conclusions, and current codes of ethics do little more than tell the archivist to use their best judgement. She desires a universal, legally-enforceable standard that completely removes personal (situational) judgment. Taking to task those who have written articles championing the archivist's right and ability to make informed situational judgments, she sees only (unwitting) abuses of power in many examples. While perhaps a bit too unyielding in her presentation, the overall message Gaudette sends is simply that a complete lack of regulations is not a defensible standard to operate by.

Hodson, Sara S. "In Secret Kept, in Silence Sealed: Privacy in the Papers of Authors and Celebrities." American Archivist. 67.2 (Fall/Winter 2004): 194-211. Print. Retrieved from JSTOR.
A return to Hodson brings this article which addresses the collections of living people of public interest. There is significant chance that these materials will contain potentially embarrassing information not just about the subject, but the people they have interacted with. The subject may not be aware the information is there, not realize that others might find it sensitive, or simply may not understand that the material might become public while they are still living. At the same time, modern society is conditioned to expect the revelation of every intimate detail about those in the public eye. There are no easy answers to dealing with situations of this nature, although Hodson valiantly attempts to address the problem and provide some suggested operating guidelines.

Benedict, Karen. "Archival Ethics." Managing Archives and Archival Institutions. Ed. James Gregory Bradsher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 174-184. Print.
Tracing the development of various codes of ethics that archival organizations follow and clarifies the reasons they must exist. The archivist walks a precarious and undefined path between the privacy concerns of the donors and patrons, and the desires of those the archive serves to have unfettered access to as much information as possible. While most codes leave a great deal of room for the archivist to make decisions regarding privacy, the overarching concern is to prevent any malicious harm and minimize potential problems.

Internship, week of 3/26

One of Gest's major contributions was the discovery of "a new family of photosynthetic green bacteria (Heliobacteriaceae, which includes Heliobacterium gestii)"... that's right, one of them was even named after him. There's an entire box of documents related to this discovery and I think it's relevant to keep them together. Gest had already given them headings based on groupings that seem pretty logical and I'm not entirely certain how they should be arranged otherwise, so I preserved the original order and headings wherever possible. I considered a few other options and decided this was the most reasonable course, but I worry a little bit that this is actually an excuse for playing it safe. I'll get some advice from Phil on that.

Internship, week of 3/19

In 1987 Gest published a book called The World of Microbes, which was basically a microbiology primer for the layman who doesn't know a bacteria from a virus. I suppose if he'd written it a few years later it could have been a "for Dummies" book. This book was translated in to several other languages, including French and Japanese. After 9/11 when fear of anthrax and other forms of (badly-reported) bio-terrorism were all over the news, Gest attempted to interest certain departments of the government in buying backstock or printing a new edition.

I'm not sure if anyone took him up on it. Since it seems to bookend a fairly large file on The World of Microbes, I'm guessing sadly not.