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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 wrote for it, and here's an excerpt of part of it that I think is amusing:

Other items of note in the collection include fax correspondence with Coretta Scott King, a manuscript of a musical Bennett authored about Mayor Harold Washington called Harold’s Journey, personal artifacts such as press passes from the Chicago Police Department and the White House, bottles of ink, a National Reparations Convention t-shirt, keys to cities such as Cincinnati, Cleveland and Birmingham and more.

While I was at it I also made a list of relevant helpful Library of Congress Subject Headings and Call Numbers there too. The Bennett notes are all here. I also cleaned up the Charles E. Freeman notes I took too, in case those might come in helpful. Those notes are all here,

And we also looked at the pictures Frank took a couple weeks ago! He did good. They're all here. And someone at CSU made a wonderful video from the Charles E. Freeman event! It's so nice.  I was proud to have been part of that exhibit. I'm floating around in the background in a few scenes.

There I am. What a debut!

Note: some of these links to the photos and video I think you have to get permission to view, but all you do is click on a link and after a few minutes it emails and says you get access.


Also! I sleuthed around and found more links between Bennett and CSU! He gave the keynote address to the 12th annual Gwendolyn Brooks Writers' Conference at CSU organized by Haki R. Madhubuti (who did the introduction, Bennett comes in at 12:50.) It was on C-Span, and I found it in the weeds of the sources quoted of Bennett's Wikipedia page. It always pays to look at the details.


Lastly, today Kheir and I also talked about my next steps in the MLIS program at CSU and Kheir gave me some good advice about internships, volunteering and career stuff. I am thankful for his guidance.

--

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, 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) 

Comments

  1. GabrielApril 19, 2026 at 11:22 AM

    I think you can feel a sense of accomplishment for a job well done.

    ReplyDelete

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