Maitland A&H Summer Blog Entry 2

 This week at Maitland A&H has sadly been a bust when attending Maitland A&H. The Exhibit Manager Katie Benson is out of town. Even though I was not able to participate in the museum, it shows the difficulty it is to work in one as the best schedule to have is flexible as anything can happen that can prevent work. Without a flexible mindset being an archivist can be a tricky job. Besides not being able to work on certain days due to random events, there will be times that requests to do other jobs will come up. Knowing the archives will most likely mean that you will have to do research when requested. I have had the task of doing research for the public and answering questions. One task that I was given was to find records for one founding family of the area. With my knowledge of what we had, I quickly located documents and provided them to the lady who had requested them.

  Knowing what is in the archives means that you will most likely have first-hand knowledge of the subject. An example of this was when I, at Maitland A&H, scanned documents of the found family of the Waterhouse. I so happened to overhear a conversation that the subject was discussing the family. With my knowledge of what I had seen in the documents that I had scanned, I provided information to the museum workers that they did not know about. Being the keeper of information gives that idea of importance as people need you as you have the knowledge they seek.

  Discussing time and having people ask research questions provides another discussion that I must address. The museum having documents digitalized will help ease the work for the archivist as those who seek knowledge will be able to find it online. The only problem is that it takes time and money to get such a task done. To digitalize one document could take up to 10 minutes; this is with everything going wrong and the machinery slowing down. Museums must have the fund and time to have their documents online. Maitland A&H only has me when it comes to digitization; therefore, it is slow and tedious work. Once going through the trouble of putting things online has provided me with a new perspective of appreciation of using digital sources. A simple set of sources could have taken hours to put online. Now looking at digital archives with thousands of objects the question that I have now is how long it must have taken to put all of them online?

  What has been discussed is still only a snippet of what it is like to be an archivist. There is still plenty more to talk about. Next week I will discuss why weather means a lot when working in the archives.

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