January Progress Report on the Architectural Drawing Collection

A little over thirty work days have passed in the academic calendar since the archives began to rehouse and arrange our room full of architectural drawings. As of Monday, over 700 pieces from this collection had been interleaved with archival tissue, recorded with a location ID, and rehoused into flat file drawers or drop-front boxes.

The next step in providing access to this collection begins later this month. The archives will consult with our School of Architecture, Civil Engineering Technology, and Construction to find out how faculty would best like to see the collection described for access. We'll take into account the preservation of the drawings and how students may best benefit from this resource in the future. Then the library's new Cataloger, Brenton Stewart, will work with the archives on describing the collection. Finally, a web portal will be built around the catalog information.

If this sounds like a lot of work, you're right! Our goal is to have a little over a quarter of the prints cataloged for SPSU access by Fall semester. While Brenton works on the cataloging metadata associated with this project, here at the archive we'll still be rehousing our thousands of drawings, which include all kinds of ephemera and other sorts of mixed media.