Sunday, March 4, 2007

New Project at OSU Archives

I began working on a new project yesterday. I'm determining browsing terms for the Oregon State University Archives collections listed in the Northwest Digital Archives . The NDA provides access to archival and manuscript materials in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington through a union database of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids.

This means I am reading detailed descriptions of the collections and determining which browsing terms from an approved list might be appropriate to use. For example, one collection has documents from the Oregon Board of Regents 1886-1929 and includes correspondence dealing with problems at what is now Oregon State University of feeding students, a decree that students should be made to live on campus unless they have written permission from parents or the college president, a petition from students complaining about a professor (who was later fired), a complaint from students about the lack of heat, and another complaint from students, this one complaining that they are not receiving individual attention in classroom work. The browsing term I added was "student life".