This week, I scheduled a second oral history interview, for mid-November. John was the first person to call me wanting to participate and he lived at Edgewood from 1958-1963. I need to begin doing more research on the time period, but he is full of stories and eager to share his experiences so I don’t think the interview will be too challenging. It will be a good first ever oral history interview. The hardest part will be staying on track and limiting it to just an hour. He wants to come to Edgewood for the interview, so I’ll give him a tour after and I’m sure he’ll have even more to share!
I also called the third oral history interviewee, a man named Jim who left Edgewood right before John came, and they have mutual acquaintances. Between the two interviews, I’ll be able to capture nearly 10 years of residential life. I talked to Jim for about half an hour on the phone to complete the biographical profile form and learn a little bit about him. He also wants to come to Edgewood for the interview so he can see the campus again. I told him I’d like to do a little more research before scheduling the interview, and he was fine with that. I’ll call him in early November to arrange a time.
News continues to spread around the organization about my archives project. My boss got a call from someone saying they found a box of “old stuff” and was wondering if I wanted it. It turned out to be records from the 1980s, photographs and other things similar to what I found in the gym balcony, so I added to the pile. A couple of days later, I got an email from another person saying they found boxes of old Board meeting minutes and the CEO had told her to contact me to see if I wanted them. I discovered the minutes went all the way back to the 1950s, so I decided to take them and added another three boxes and four binders to my ever growing stash of records to organize. It’s getting harder to find storage space to keep everything together.
I had been planning on spending an upcoming weekend day sorting all of the records into series, but I believe I’m now up to 20 boxes of materials to go through! It’s going to take longer than I originally thought and I am going to try to recruit some help so it doesn’t take an entire week. I think I have a good idea of what series I want to create: Hope Ball, Garden Fair, orphan files, other events, newsletters, annual reports, Board meeting minutes, photographs, etc. I’m not as sure about what to do with some things, like the newspaper clippings, though. I’m debating about whether they should be a series themselves or if they should be sorted into other series based upon content, such as if they are about an event. That’s probably more proper and professional, but it’s also a lot more time consuming. I’m learning that some records very clearly go together as a series, while others are more debatable and can be viewed in multiple ways. The challenge is then to think about how a user may search for the records so they can be organized to be most easily retrieved.
Edgewood Tales 