Archives for the Month of November 2007 on Andrew's collection of thoughts
WRITING!... agian
Within my fraternity, Delta Upsilon, there are a couple of brothers who are declared engineering majors. Merely for being engineers they have courses that are core to all engineering majors. Classes such as physics, chemistry, and calculus; further, many of these classes have laboratories to go with them. Later on, after the discipline within engineering is declared there are many classes more specific to that field, for example mechanical engineers will take statics, and dynamics, and fluids. There are, of course, SAGES courses that all students need to complete. By graduation, all students are required to take two in-department SAGES courses.
All of these classes have their own kinds of writing requirements. In the engineering and science classes, most of the writing is homework and class notes. Writing on those documents tends be heavy with equations, charts, and scientific properties. In upper-level classes, students need to write papers in conjunction with engineering projects in order to explain what precisely said project is about. There is also the oddball short writing assignment. The hardest papers are probably those assigned in engineering ethics, dealing with the various ethical dilemmas that engineers face.
In labs, students need to write the obligatory lab report, a long, obtuse piece of writing that is so dense with terminology that a person practically needs a dictionary to translate it sentence by sentence. Unfortunately only a very limited portion of these labs have any real creativity in it, due to the highly refined layout they are required to follow. Within a lab report, it is the abstract that paraphrases the entire lab, and the conclusion that sums up the results vs. expectations, after that, the rest of the lab is numbers and step-by-step descriptions of procedure.
Finally there are the SAGES courses, which are writing seminars. Obviously in a writing seminar there is a great deal of writing, as per the name. Since in later years, it is within the department, engineers take seminars taught by engineering professors, and write the papers required of them. After those classes, there is the senior capstone, a wide-ranging assignment that takes the entire year to complete and comprises of many pages of essay and analysis.
As an engineer, writing is designed to help specifically with what is needed in the job market, to write reports, drafts, and offers. All papers assigned while studying are there to help students learn and get used to what they will be writing once they graduate. Since this is the case, writing is nothing more than an instrument used to convey information in a standardized format for others to interpret.
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Archives exist to save information for the future. This information comes in many forms, whether it be writing, music, batons or otherwise. At the Cleveland Orchestra archives, all of the above and more are part of their vast archival collection. Archivist Amy Dankowski has been in charge of the collection for a number of years now and was able to explain all about what types of things get stored and why. She explained that an archive isn’t just a haphazard pile of papers, but rather a very organized, structured method of storage and filing.
All archives are very unique and individualized, and therefore each have their own systems to on how to accomplish the task of filing items in a logical sense. The Cleveland Orchestra archives are no different, however most other archives will have theirs in a similar sort of way. First, the entire archive is divided into several smaller subgroups each containing items that are not duplicated in any other groups and which all are similar in some fashion, such finances. Within each group are collections of items that all came from a single source. Then, at the beginning of each source group is a document known as a finding aide. The finding aide explains what precisely is within that collection, how many boxes and linear feet there are, and what approximately is in each box. In addition, the finding aide gives a short background of the items, including previous owners and origin.
All archivists must write and maintain these finding aides, as such finding aides will usually need to be updated periodically as material is reorganized and possibly added to. In addition, nearly all archives are regularly expanded upon and condensed. This being the case, new material is always being sorted into relevant groupings and documented.
Archives are only valuable if they can be used in meaningful ways, it is a waste to spend resources on the upkeep of an archive if the material within isn’t being used for anything. For private businesses this generally means financial records, meeting minutes, and other important internal communication. And in some instances, old historical documents from the early days of said business. In the case of other institutions, often archives will be made of pamphlets and flyers and such things, along with scrapbooks put together over the years, in addition to finance records and minutes.