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.
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