ASB
2002

MelissaWahl, Geri Durka-Pelok, and Erin Doumpoulaki spent five days at the Archives of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Although none of them specializes in Archives and Records Management (ARM) at SI, their skills and collaborative effort matched the Archives' need very well.

As a team, Geri, Melissa, and Erin organized and converted archival documents and records from word-processor document formats to spreadsheet format, as the first step in transferring the records into the Oracle database that AAAS uses for its organizational data. As Melissa wrote a Perl script to transform documents, Geri and Erin performed data entry and normalization. They also created another database to document the basic development of committees created in the history of AAAS. Finally, Melissa and Erin proofread the 2700+ entry catalogue before closing the project.

The project required collaboration and coordination among the students themselves, and between the students and the archivist. It also gave them the opportunity to work on something that's not the immediate or primary focus of their specialization; yet their preparation proved appropriate for the AAAS history project.