This is a guest post from Jessie Storlien, Archivist at the Stearns History Museum. Read more about our Extended Mini Grant Program or fill out one of our applications. This program is only available during the FY21 school year.
Stearns History Museum Buys Archival Supplies!
The Stearns History Museum Research Center had a backlog of items waiting to be processed. Space and supply constraints kept us from boxing and shelving new large collections. However, after receiving the CMLE minigrant, we were able to order the boxes and folders necessary to organize and process the large collections waiting in our overflow storage room. This, coupled with the construction of 75 more shelves in the archives will clear much of the unprocessed collections backlog.
Materials cover a breadth of topics from business and politics to women and children. Specific collections include: writers, Marilyn Salzl Brinkman and Jeannette Blonigen Clancy’s, interviews, research, and photos; World War I veteran Wesley Danneker’s photo albums, pilot log, and accompanying documents; materials from Electrolux upon its closing last year; United Cerebral Palsy of Central MN collection detailing their organization’s work in the area. Most of the materials are images, ephemera, documents, audio-visual materials, and other archival items.
To process the collections, materials will be filed, boxed, and cataloged. Each box will receive a unique number and a shelf location. The metadata for the collections will be recorded at the file level into our new library catalog when it goes live before the end of this year. This processing project will allow us to create more retrievability to the collections than is currently available, both physically and through recorded data.
The focus of this project was accessibility for staff and patrons. This includes the ability to search for and find items that are in processing. Preparing collections to be entered into the new library catalog, and creating metadata that enhances searches in that system is also a priority. The broadest goal is to allow researchers to discover and obtain information from the collections at SHM.
We want to honor our commitment to donors by keeping materials as preserved as possible, while also creating accessible information for researchers. The boxes and folders purchased through this minigrant will help us meet our strategic plan goals to preserve, process, and create accessible collections. Thank you!