This past spring semester (2019), APH student Abbey Wilson interned with the New York City Municipal Archives in New York City. Below you’ll find Abbey ’s blog post about his experience.
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During the 2019 Spring semester, I made the trek once a week out to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where the New York City Municipal Archives houses one of their offsite storage facilities. The New York City Municipal Archives operates as an independent agency under the umbrella of the Department of Records and Information Services. In 2012, the archive saw an increase in interest which led to increased staffing and funding. They recently undertook a survey of all of their holdings, including offsite storage, and discovered that the majority of collections were unaccessioned and unprocessed. In the course of this survey, they discovered three collections of records from the Department of Transportation that appeared to have come into the archive’s custody at around the same time. My task for this internship was to determine if they were all the same collection, and whether or not it should be accessioned.
In order to gain more information about the materials, I needed to appraise them. I did this by physically gaining control over the collection, which entailed creating a detailed inventory in Microsoft Excel and rehousing them as necessary. I also filled out an appraisal form which required information such as who the creators of these records were, what topics the records covered, and whether or not these records were unique. I also had to determine whether or not the records fit with the collection policy of the Municipal Archives.
The process of appraising the DOT collection was incredible. I had never appraised anything before and was surprised by how much of the work I was doing would be critical to subsequent processing. My inventory had started out as something that was only supposed to be for me, written down in a notebook so as to make filling out the appraisal form easier. My boss, Rachel Greer, encouraged me to turn it into a spreadsheet which then made it a generally useful tool for understanding the collection. There are so many wonderful and supportive people working at the municipal archives, and I always felt that the work I was doing was important and would be helpful to them in the future.