An Archival Journey

Archival work can be very confusing and hard to understand for someone who has not ever visited an archives. This blog post will hopefully help shed a light on what an archives is, what archivists do, and why they are important. To begin, it is important to understand what is an archives. First of all, an archives is special type of library. It can be a department within a library, a branch of a company, or a stand-alone institution. Its main purpose is to collect, preserve, and store documents and artifacts for future use. These documents come from within the company it is housed, or from the surrounding communities they serve. However, it is not just any document that gets collected, but are documents that have a research value to them. Most documents and artifacts within an archive is contained within a collection that has been donated by a person, government/school department, or company. The person who oversees all of this is called an archivist. Archivists work with the ...

This is the second part of a two part finding aid for the Eric Theodore Carlson collection. This part features the scope and content note and the container list.                                                                                         Scope and Content: This collection consists of letters and correspondence sent between Eric Carlson and his family as well as school officials, prospective employers, and Army officials from 1944-1946. The letters document Carlson’s years in college, his time in the Army, and the initial months of school a...