My feet on the dash.

[hannah]

My internship officially started today. Yesterday was an introduction to the work and the materials, and today I started doing the work my supervisor wants to see finished by the time I leave. It wasn't much - we only had an hour - but it was pretty fun. All I did was catalogue scrapbooks, which pretty much plays right to my strengths. This involved taking notes on the contents, the state of the scrapbook itself, and possible preservation methods for both the contents and the book. It's six big boxes of loose papers, handbound manuscripts, scrapbooks, letters, requests to reprint poems, miscellaneous framed poems, a painting or two, and no small number of medals and awards. Some of which need to be polished. It's a very good thing I've still got my preservation textbooks, and even better I've got a bit of time to read about archival finding aids before I need to write one myself. Stressful, cerebral, and solitary...yeah, I think I can make this work. A fair bit of the work's going to be autonomous and remote - there's a tangled mess of copyright ownerships of poems that I need to track down. Just because we have her papers doesn't mean we own her poems. Not all of them, at any rate.

Amazingly enough, she doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, but you can read a bit about the poet - not poetess, poet, thank you kindly - Sara Henderson Hay right here. Although it doesn't go deeply into anything, it's a good overview of a pretty vivid life.

I managed to hit the gym as well, and did quite a bit of heavy lifting that felt utterly fantastic.

Comments

[hannahrorlove.livejournal.com]

Will do!