Dittrick Medical Library Visit
Writing is one of the primary ways of gaining insight into the past, which educates others on past ideas and notions which aids in the progression through all fields of study. These writings, while useful and informative are useless if they are not kept in good condition and in order. There are countless pieces of writings from the past, though it is nearly impossible to know how many of those are found and stored by archivists. The Dittrick Medical Library contains thousands of pieces of writing from the past that they store within their facilities. The archivists record and store all of the writings discovered in a delicate manner, making sure that if ever necessary they can find exactly what they need and it will be kept in good condition.
The Dittrick Medical Library uses the finding aid system to locate their contents. Another commonly used organizational system is the Dewey Decimal System, which is probably one of the most common forms of organizing writings and is used in almost every library nationwide. Its purpose is to organize the thousands of writings in the library so that the customers will be able to find which book they want to read through a number system. Without it, finding any particular book would take an unreasonable amount of time and effort if it was found at all since it would constitute looking through every book with no reference points.
Without these systems in place to organize contents in places such as libraries, the lack of order would be a major inconvenience to most everyone. While the lack of order would make the jobs of the archivists much easier, it would also make their work meaningless since no one would be able to access the facilities contents. All of a sudden finding an article or document on early forms of contraceptives, which was talked about during our visit to the Dittrick Library, would take too much time and effort for it to be worthwhile, thus hindering the progress to potentially be made by viewing and assessing what others have done through their writings.
Archivists also have to make sure to take care of these documents; paper and ink are not indestructible objects so they must be handled with care, and stored in temperature controlled rooms. For this reason, some of the documents have been placed on display for the public to view and not touch and other documents are available for the public to handle and look over. If every person were to handle an original document discussing the primary efforts in creating the first contraceptive, no matter how careful they are, the document will get worn and weathered, thus losing value and practicality depending on how bad the condition gets.
Another way to avoid the wear and tear that the documents and other forms of information would undergo within the publics’ reach is to make copies of the material and preserve the originals. This way there is no loss in translation from original to copy, the original is saved and can be preserved properly and the library can loan out numerous copies rather than just the one.
Archivists have and important job in controlling and maintaining the preservation and order of historical documents. These documents’ writings would be useless if it weren’t for the writings that surrounds them, allowing those respective others to find what it is they are looking for.
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