Anne Holcomb, Kristi Barksdale, Sarah Hughes, Mark Matienzo, John Heilman, Allison Boyer, Stephanie Thomas, Angela Sidman and Kristen Arbutiski spent their Spring Break at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History Archives Center in Washington, D.C. working on a variety of archival projects.

No matter what specialization students pursue at SI, the Archives staff soon makes processing, provenance and preservation familiar concepts for the students and sets them to tasks of organizing, rehousing, creating finding aids, and providing much-needed support for its rare and valuable pieces of American history. 
 
 
 
 

Sarah worked with the Ella Fitzgerald collection, and her duties ranged from clipping and arranging newspaper articles about her marvelous career, to sorting and appraising the small collection of her books that NMAH acquired, to creating a container listing of scripts and performance programs. She also performed collection maintenance on the Estelle Ellis collection.
 
 

Angela worked with the Cayton Family Papers. This collection included letters between Rosa and Max Cayton written in the 1890's; contracts, timebooks, and ledgers from their family business dating from about 1910-1935; correspondence between Rosa and Max's five sons written during WW II; and photographs of the family from the 1890's to the 1980's. She organized the papers into series and then placed them into chronological order within series. Additionally, she made phase boxes to house fragile materials such as the ledgers from the family business. The photographs were all rehoused in protective inert plastic and organized into a distinct series.
 
 

Kristen and John's task was to assess a collection of 378 educational posters from Puerto Rico and then impose a classification system on the collection. They eventually sorted the posters into three main series: events, social services, and economics and employment. After placing all the sorted posters into folders, Kristen and John also created bilingual (English/Spanish) finding aids. "The project that we worked on was challenging but also interesting and satisfying," John commented. "To create order out of chaos and then know that someday soon the public will be using our classification system in their research was a great feeling."
 
 
 
 
 
 

More of our students at work!