Week One, Day One- September 21

Today was my first full day at what will become the Birmingham Black Radio Museum. My directed study buddy, Latoya, and I spent the day going through much of the collection to get a feel for what we would be working with for the next semester. We went through so many folders of photos and letters! A good deal of the materials had names and a few had dates, but the museum project director, Bob Friedman said that he knew who almost everyone was in the photos or he would be able to find out. It will be so nice to have a resource that will be able to identify a great majority of the people related to the collection.
As we went through the collection, we took note of what types of materials and what would be needed to organize and preserve them. Most of the collection is made up of photographs and luckily, none of them seem to be too deteriorated, so hopefully once we get them into protective casing they will last a long time.
After we finished going through everything to get a feel for what was there, we made a list of tasks that we need to complete to get a good start of the collection becoming a museum and being useful for researchers.
1. Organize and group like materials
a. By radio station
b. By decade
2. Place in protective cases and folders
3. Develop a unique identification system for the collection
4. Migrate materials into new technology
5. Begin to catalog
6. Create metadata
7. Scan materials into a computer
I’m not sure how far we will get in this list over the course of the semester, but I think that we will be able to at least organize the materials, develop a unique identification system, and being the process of cataloging and creating metadata. I really want to get to this stage in the process because it is my favorite part of the archival process as the metadata opens the materials up to be searched and used to their full extent.
I think in order to get the most out of this experience; it would be good for me to read some materials about the creation of unique identification systems in order to create the best one for this collection. If might also be very helpful to find out as much about the history of black radio in Birmingham. This would give me a better idea of what I was looking at when we get to the creation of metadata because you always want to know as much about a collection as possible before arriving at this stage.