Week Five, Day Seven- October 19

I felt like today was one of the most productive days that we had at the museum. Since most of the photos had made it into protective sleeves, we were able to move on to the actual cataloging of the images and papers. We began with the 1930s since this decade had the least amount of materials. At first we started out with the unique identifier system that Latoya and I had developed earlier, but as we worked, we found that it really wasn't going to work for the needs the collection. At first, we thought that we should work each individual radio station into the number, but this became a problem because some of the materials were not related to any one radio station. This caused us to drop the radio station from the system. So, our final unique identifier number will look like this 0002.0002.000001. The first number tells you what type of material the item is, whether its a picture, manuscript, or recording. The next number tells you what decade the item is from and the last number is the individual item's number within each collection. We were able to make a spread sheet for the 1930s and 1940s. Once we have made a spread sheet for each decade and given each item its own unique identifier, Latoya and I are going to sit down with Bob and have him give us as much information about each piece as he can. We will use this information to refine the metadata and to create a finding aid that can be used by researchers or other interested persons.