We are out at the Library Connections Annex now! All of the material from the Hall Hoag Collection is stored at the Annex and we will be working through all 1,600 boxes this summer. The goal of this stage is to collate all of the folders containing items from the same organizations. The current boxes we have are in the order that the items were shipped to Brown. We will be working to take the items out of the original boxes and place them in boxes labeled with letters of the alphabet. As a group we should be able to refile 25-30 boxes each day. The work will include checking the original boxes against a folder inventory to ensure we have the correct boxes (and they are inventoried), refiling the material into new boxes in alphabetical order, and then updating the old inventories with the new boxes numbers for each of the folders. We will have 8 students working in 3 teams full time all summer. We hope to get through the entire collection. This will also provide us the opportunity to see all of the material as we refile it, so we should have some great highlights to share on the blog.

Students Filing the Material Into Alpha Boxes

Students Inventorying Boxes

We have finished researching over 1500 organizations in the collection and we found locations for 900 of them. Massachusetts and New York have the highest number of organizations and if you combine, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and California you would have more than half of the organizations in this subset. Although the results here are only for 900 organizations, I would not be surprised if the trends continued throughout the collection. It is also interesting that so far we have found material from 45 different states and 25 organizations with international locations. The charts below contain the data that we have found so far.