1st Day

Today was my first day of a directed study that I will be doing over the course of this semester. I will be working at the Birmingham Black Radio Museum. Right now, the museum is more of just an idea than an actual museum. The idea for the museum came from the owner of WJLD, Gary Richardson, and its manager, Bob Friedman. I am really looking forward to working on the archives that will become part of the museum. Right now everything is just in boxes and there has been some organization by the person who is spearheading the idea for the museum, Bob Friedman. At this point, it is my understanding that the collection for the library contains several transcription disks, which is how radio programs were recorded and shared back in the day, some radio catalogs, sheet music, pictures from the history of several black radio stations, and other papers that have been collected that tell the history of black radio in Birmingham.

The project is a very long way from becoming a museum, but I think it will be really fun to get in at the ground level of the project and hopefully see it grow into a full fledged museum. It seems like the first thing that we will be doing is get all the materials into archive safe containers and folders. The most important thing right now is to make sure that the materials in the collection are preserved and are not allowed to deteriorate any more. Then we will get to begin the organization process. Much of the materials are already organized to some point, but I think that they will need more work. This has always been my favorite part of the archiving process. I love to find the links between different pieces of the collection and building the bridges between every part of the collection. I'm not sure how much of the organizing we will be able to get to, but I hope that we will get to spend at least a few days on this. One thing I highly doubt we will be able to work on this semester is cataloging the collection. This has to be the most time consuming part of archiving and I really don't think that we will be able to get this far in the process.

I'm really excited about the whole experience and I can't wait to get my hands dirty and start putting the collection together. Another part of this whole project that I'm really excited about it that fact that we will have a real life resource in Bob Friedman. He knows most of the history, so he will really be able to help get everything organized and provide a great deal of history for each piece in the collection.