Skip to main content

A Day of Writing!

This week we're doing Tuesday instead of Thursday because of schedule conflicts, so it felt like I was just here (which I was on Thursday). That's OK, I like being on campus.

What a busy day! Kheir and I collaborated on finishing the wording for what will go over the Justice Freeman "hero" portrait that will be blown up for the Justice Freeman commemorative event (which has been moved from the original date in February to a non-finalized date that is up in the air). I also spent time preparing files in InDesign for 2 of the 3 portraits that will be enlarged, and sent them off to Kheir as well. I also wrote a bunch of the wording that will go in the tri-fold brochure. I thought I was going to have to design it as well, but thankfully we can just send the wording and the images off to the design department! I was delighted to learn this because I'm used to working in small businesses where one person does kind of everything. The fact that there were employees who take care of entire tasks is a breath of fresh air.

I also continued laying out and itemizing the items that will be in the glass cases for the exhibit, descriptions, notes about where they go when the exhibit is over, the source of the materail etc. A bunch of that information will be printed on labels that I am to make, and Kheir let me borrow a book that describes the official ways institutions tend to do it for exhibits, displays, etc. He also supplied me with a binder full of the CSU Archives and Special Collections special procedures, etc. It was very elucidating.

So it was mostly a busy day in front of my computer working on wording, and I sort of love that a lot of today was about doing writing, which is a challenge that I enjoy. Some of it was technical and some of it was tiny essays ("Why Freeman Matters"), and I was under the gun in a way that I sort of thrived on, especially because I enjoy collaboration with Kheir in this particular way.

a riveting read


--
Today's standards fulfilled as per the Society of American Archivists Curriculum:

Society of American Archivists Curriculum: A. CORE ARCHIVAL KNOWLEDGE, 1. Knowledge of Archival Material and Functions, b) Appraisal for Selection and Acquisition, g. Management and Administration (p. 5)
A. CORE ARCHIVAL KNOWLEDGE, 2. Knowledge of the Profession, c) Professional Ethics and Values (p. 7)
A. CORE ARCHIVAL KNOWLEDGE, 1. Knowledge of Archival Material and Functions, f) Outreach, Instruction, and Advocacy (p. 6)
A. CORE ARCHIVAL KNOWLEDGE, 3. Contextual knowledge, a) Social and Cultural Context, d) Underserved & Underrepresented Communities (pp. 7-8) 
B. COMPLEMENTARY KNOWLEDGE, B. Structure of the Learning Process (pp 8-9)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Notes and Plans!

Today is one of my last days in the archive, because the semester is ending soon! Today Kheir and I talked about the evaluation letter he has to write, as well as what the next couple weeks will look like for me. Next week I'll be doing the zine workshop as part of Library Week at the archive (info about that here) , and then the week after that Kheir will be out of town. So for all practical purposes, this is my last day to actually actively work on things in the archive, and specifically with the Lerone Bennett Jr. collection I was working on. So what I did was organize all my notes to pass them along to Kheir to help with fleshing out descriptions with the finding aid. He mentioned that it would be helpful to have more description about what the archive holds, so I rewrote the pre-existing bio and added some of the highlights of the things I found. That way there's some good selling points to entice people to come look at the archive. I guess I'm kind of proud of what I ...
2 comments
Read more

Seeking Fortunes

Today was a weird one. Like last week, in my journey looking for that piece of paper that Bennett wrote working titles for Forced Into Glory , I kept getting derailed by trying to make sense of what was in each folder, because somehow now I'm both looking for that piece of paper and doing a more specific itemization of what I'm encountering in the folders. It's difficult to know what a lot of the manuscripts were because they were in bits and pieces. Bennett would use a lot of material for multiple projects, reworking speeches into magazine articles and then into books. And of course, he kept each draft of everything he wrote along with all the notes. Very few things are labelled, and a pile of papers in any given folder will start at some random page, end at another page, then next to it in the same folder there will be another pack of papers organized the same way. I was having to do a lot of scanning texts with my phone and then converting it to readable text, then copy/...
2 comments
Read more

Welcome to my CSU blog for my Spring 2026 practicum in the CSU Archives and Special Collections!

This is a blog devoted to my Field Practicum (for LIS Practicum 5970-51) for Chicago State University. I'm Liz (Elizabeth) Mason, in the MLIS program, and my specialization is in Archives and Records Management. This is the Spring 2026 semester. This blog serves as a journal to document my experience as required by the class. This class is a 1 credit course, and the practicum itself is on the CSU campus, in the University Archives and Special Collections (it’s on the 3rd floor of the Gwendolyn Brooks Library), with university archivist Kheir Fakhreldin. So far I have gone in for one day, even though technically the semester hadn't started yet. The day I went in was last Thursday, 1/8/26, and I was there from 10am to 3pm. Kheir gave me a tour of the archive (including what peridocials it holds, the CSU prediential portraits, the offices and workrooms of the archive and more). He also showed me selected materials (newspaper clippings, documents, pictures etc) from the Justice Fr...
Read more