July 9th - Arrangement and hierarchy decisions

Today finally saw the Ernie Arnold collection finished...166 items! He never got any more interesting--his subjects continued to be money, writing letters, inquiring after family, suntans, and gift-giving. There were two last flora and fauna letters--one about island trees and one about a single, tiny tropical fish. The chronology he created and that was in the donor file remained far more exciting than the letters, referring to actual combat, explosions, near-death experiences and the like. The self-censoring he did for his mother combined with the descriptive censoring he did for the Navy made this a very bland collection. The most interesting aspect of processing the Arnold collection was by far having to pull the donor file to try to establish his locations for each of the letters so that a fairly accurate geographic subject heading could be included.


Once complete, however, it was time to move on to 2013.507 - The McWilliams collection. This was a small collection of five letters received by the civilian McWilliams from three different men they knew who served in the war. What proved interesting here was that when I opened the collection record in KE-EMu, I discovered an archival collection record and a series record nested within, which is not in keeping with the archives' goals for these items (a refresher: collection and item level records only are what is desired). However, the archival collection and series records contained more detailed descriptions of the collection than the collection record itself. In order to preserve the information, I copied it from the sub-records into the main record. Another decision out of step with the collections I've worked on so far was the arrangement of the letters by authors as opposed to date. This is the first collection I've dealt with where the donor was a civilian sharing correspondence with multiple service people, as opposed to the opposite. Luckily, once I looked through them, the dates on each authors letters didn't overlap at all. I was able to do a simultaneous arrangement by author and date.


Difficult issues with this one have proved determining the unit--the first author didn't have a distinct unit number of any type. When I asked, I learned that we would just leave the unit blank in this case. Verifying unit and location has been the most time-consuming task in making sure the item records are as complete as possible.