Spring 2020
The importance of the archival practice and how archivist have a responsibility to society - May 19, 2020
In INFO 5370, I learned about the history of the archival profession. I found this course very interesting, because it opened my eyes to how much power archivists, and information professionals in general, have over the narrative of world history. Archivists are typically the ones responsible for maintaining society's collective history. As a result, we constantly have to make decisions about what information gets saved and what does not. There is immense pressure on us to be equitable in how we go about our work, so that all the narratives and voices within our society are equally represented in the historical record despite how we personally may feel about them. That being said, I think that pressure is what makes archives such an interesting and important profession. Archivists play an important role in society and without them it is likely that many important artifacts of our collective past would have been lost to time. Knowing this gives me some peace of mind when I think about the future of this profession and makes me excited for how I will be a part of it.
The difficulties of working on the IOP in INFO 5200 - May 23, 2020
Working on the IOP for INFO 5200 was a very harrowing, but also interesting, experience. At the beginning of the course, I was feeling very overwhelmed with how much work laid ahead of me. However, as I started working and got a feel for what I was actually gonna do for the project I got more comfortable and felt that the work was a lot easier than I expected. For my IOP, I chose to work on a collection that was near and dear to my heart, the Playstation 2 games library. It was interesting to see how working with video games did not differ too much from books in terms of actual organization and description. Most games have stories or plots that can be treated the same way descriptively that plots and stories in books are.
Some examples of PS2 Game Covers that I scanned for the IOP.
Really the most difficult part of the whole project was writing the cataloging instructions. Playstation 2 games do not have a completely standardized layout for where descriptive information is placed on their packaging, unlike books. For books you can often just point the cataloger to the front matter of the book or the back cover. The location of descriptive information is often fairly easy to locate. With Playstation 2 games, however, descriptive information can be strewn all over place and often can only be found by booting up the game. As a result, it was difficult to tell the cataloger exactly where to look for descriptive information, and often times I had to point them to multiple potential locations for information.