I've got a good one, a few years back I interned at a local archive in order to beef up my CV and get some general experience, because at this point I had none. After introducing myself and doing some light filing and genealogy work, I asked the head archivist if she had anything she wanted done but couldn't do herself. Then she showed me the basement.

Over the years, the archive had been donated many hundreds of items, but couldn't do anything with them because it was an archive, not a museum. So all these artifacts and objects were moved to the many empty shelves in the basement. The archive itself was a former jailhouse and the remaining cells were in the basement, completely loaded with stuff. My first job was cleaning this first room of the basement out, moving everything to the furthest back room, so they could turn the cell area into a mini museum. This done, I was moved to the third room where all the previous items had been moved: bottles, musical instruments, even an old WWI Memorial.

After a few days of cleaning and cataloging I came across with these two old school metal garbage cans, one was full of documents and papers, the other had a bunch of junk. Except for something extremely heavy at the bottom. I pulled out the object, looked at it for a second, realized what it was and immediately got my boss. "Ms. Gandy, will you come downstairs with me, I need to show you something." So she followed me downstairs looked at it and said "Well, what is it?"

An Artillery Shell, Rusted, leaking black powder and extremely unstable.

I put the shell in a box and brought it upstairs (nearly dropping the thing, and becoming a stain on the wall in the process) where the archivist called the Sheriff. The Sheriff took a look at it and called SLED (State Law Enforcement Division) The SLED guy showed up and called the Army. When the Army finally arrived, they took a look at it and said it was so unstable they couldn't risk carting it to their base 45 minutes away The Army took the bomb out to the local racetrack and had to blow it up there, along with various other shotgun shells and bullets I had found in the basement of this archive.

Oooh! The Australian National Library, which I love with all my heart, is sort've weird in that it has a remarkable quantity of primary evidence concerning WWII era Finland. It has a document at the moment that I'm super interested to see titled 'The Mannerheim Clique Will Answer for their Crimes!' It's an English-language Soviet propaganda pamphlet dating to November 1939, shortly after the onset of the Winter War. It's not exactly of a great deal of use for me, but I'm pretty excited to see what sort of salacious rumours the Soviets were cooking up about the Finns, particularly first hand like this!

General question to all you archivists out there:

THe digital future of archives - yay or nay? The way I hear things, the move to digitize great parts of archival collections has been faced with criticism, especially pertaining to longevity. In short, we know how long paper and microfilm lasts - do we really know how long hard drives, jpgs and pdfs will last?

Also, a work related complaint: I have to use the German Federal Archives frequently. This archive took over many a record from the former GDR archives in Potsdam. Mainly it is stuff pertaining to the Nazi era which the GDR archives copied from other Eastern European archives. However, some of the stuff can not be seen as a user because they say that they only give out microfilms if they have the originals and with the GDR stuff, they don't know if they have the originals because there is no concordance. This annoys me greatly.

I've got sort of a general archival question I could ask.

I'm currently pursuing my Masters in Library and Information Science, but hope to focus on and find a future in archives and museums rather than libraries. I worked for four years during my undergrad in the university archives and loved it, so I have some experience in the field.

My question is, are there any areas in archival study that should be focused on by a student planning on entering the field soon? Like, are there are areas of the medium that are evolving or growing, such as digital preservation? Also, any advice or tips for what I can do now to make my resume look better in the future such as volunteer opportunities and such.

Thanks!

While working on my undergraduate thesis I was reading the microfilmed correspondence between the figure I was studying and the US president at the time. The handwriting in some of the letters was pretty atrocious; a fact that was not helped by the ink that had bled through the thin slips of paper used in this particular exchange.

I was casually sitting with a friend in my living room, casually chatting about how our respective theses were doing, when I decided to ask his help deciphering this one particular section of the letter that was particularly maddening.

I'm at the part where they're discussing where they met. Ten minutes in we figured it out: "in the garden of the Bishop". Our blood went cold for a second. THE Bishop? These were spies having a rendezvous in the garden of one of the best known figures from that period? No evidence that the Bishop knew, but it was still a 'holy crap' kind of moment for me.

So I decided, in Pretoria, to go into the old Surveyor-General's kelder and check out the "ou-nommerleêrs" and "ou-plaasdiagramme," which turned out to be quite an adventure before the removal of the office to a more modern building. It had been there for nearly a century, and so things were just sitting on shelves, partial series, some really valuable things next to some bug-eaten dross. A few things were damaged from a fire (well, from the water) in the 1960s, but most of it was intact aside from the dust and old smoke that settled on everything. But the most amazing part had to be the rolled plan "storage." I noticed a closed door behind a shelving rack, and decided to see what was inside. Sure enough, what was there was about 2.5 meters of stacked roll plans dating from all over the calendar and situated all over the province, a bunch of old mining claims, and it was precarious. The only way to get in was to climb up it and start excavating. This was possibly the most dangerous thing I've done in an archival building because it was really unstable, and I did ride the plans down when one side finally gave way.

But what good is this description without a picture? Here's the thousand words, after I'd sort of restored order because I didn't want to be known as the researcher who wrecked everything.

This was easily the best-lit area of the whole kelder, with a whole fluorescent tube for it. The rest of the basement aside from the files and books was creepily full of old furniture, not an electric outlet in sight, and a grand total of three fluoro tubes to light an area about 10m by 70m in size. Yeah, I bought a flashlight. The kicker was that in the plan-surfing event room, I found nothing of actual use. It was all on the racks around the corner shrouded in the darkness of the oubliette. Good times, good times.

One of the interesting experiences I've had over the years was getting a backroom tour at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, some years ago before it was part of Drexel University.

One of the more interesting artifacts they had was several massive cabinets labelled as "Thomas Jefferson Collection". It turns out that Thomas Jefferson had quite a fossil collection, much of it from Big Bone Lick in what is now Kentucky. The also had a couple of the original labels, hand-written by none other than William Clark in 1807. These fossils included an enormous mastodon skull that probably weighed at least 200 pounds. (I may even have some pictures of this. I'll see if I can find them.)

Jefferson apparently had asked Louis and Clark to keep and eye out for any living mastodons might find while crossing the great plains. Given Jefferson's well-documented predilection for massive animals (the moose AMA a few months back), and that the existing mastodon fossils were recognized as being similar to those of elephants, which occur in Africa and Asia, this request to look for live mastodons was not anywhere as ill-informed as it sounds to us today. The American continent was full of strange critters (Moose! Mule-deer! Rattlesnakes! Bison!) and it was fully acknowledged by educated people that the organisms of the New World were often more similar to their Asian relatives than to their European affiliates (Fir trees are a good example).

I think they upgraded the collection storage sometime back in 2002 and no longer allow grubby-thumbed teenagers to rifle through their collections of irreplaceable artifacts.

I've never been in an actual physical archive. Theoretically, I can visit an archive on campus (it holds a number of Theodore Geisel's manuscripts, which does go on display every so often), but I'm an undergraduate student and I don't really have an excuse to go other than "uh, I work at access operations". So instead, I spend a lot of time going through the digital archive of the Jonestown Institute.

Basically, if you've seen a lot of my posts about Jonestown, a certain domain comes up every single time: "http://jonestown.sdsu.edu" This is the location of the website "Alternate Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple", run by the Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University. Besides hosting articles and commentary from the jonestown report (a physical journal that ended in 2013, IIRC, and is now completely online), it contains large amounts of primary source material: tapes found in Jonestown and released by the FBI through Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, Peoples Temple files, telegrams between various government agencies post-November 18, letters from relatives, newspaper articles, Peoples Temple publications, "thank you Dad" letters, the Edith Roller journals, poems from Jonestown residents, articles of corporation, etc. Most of these are online and available to the public for free. Some of the stuff does need to be ordered for a nominal fee (namely, a large number of tapes recovered from Jonestown have not been converted to MP3s, and thus you need to email them to order the tapes themselves), but otherwise the average reader can go through the material and read them/download them/etc to their heart's content.

I guess I could tell a story about stuff I've found, but I don't have time to do that today. Too much work.