An Unusual Monday

Today, when I walked into the archives for my internship, I was confronted with a massive search party. Our head librarian had arrived within the archives, desperately searching for items pertaining to the school's study abroad program in Venice (sadly, a program that has since been discontinued since her time at the school - from her descriptions, it sounds pretty awesome) for the Homecoming on the Hill event this coming weekend. In her searching, she found a box containing our information on two Cuban students at Spring Hill who helped to bring baseball to the island. She, along with our archivist, asked me to look through a stack of boxes for any other possible documents relating to the Venice Program, and also for any possible notes in our files about the program, which might have been filed under the buildings. 

As I began to work on this project, one of the Jesuits on campus sent an emailed request to the archivist asking for the dates on one of the old buildings on campus (the former Jesuit residence, Assumption Hall). I got to look up the dates within the files, and then turn to sorting through boxes. 

The first box that I opened contained a treasure trove. While it was not about the Venice Program, it did pertain to African Americans and their first years on Spring Hill's campus, and so the archivist and I set it aside within the Archives (with a special sticky note that I wrote on it - I'm looking forward to going through and cataloging everything in the box at some point in the future, if I get the chance!). The other boxes were fairly unproductive, although I did find some old editions of The Motley, our creative writing magazine, and several unbound Springhilians, our school newspaper. Otherwise, there was nothing much of interest in the boxes. The file folders also turned up nothing much of interest, so I turned to the archivist.

In the time that I had gone through boxes, the Jesuit who we had been helping with information on Assumption Hall had emailed us back, asking for more specific information. None of the documents on file had the dates requested, and so we had to turn to the books of the former archivist to find the information he was looking for. 

After this very exciting hour of work, I turned to entering more names into my list of Greek Life.

Needless to say, it was a very exciting day in the archives today. I'm looking forward to more work on the list on Wednesday, and possibly planning out some Civil War artifacts for a student group coming in on Thursday and Friday.