More McCurdy!

Lisa and I are currently working our way through the beginning stages of making an inventory.  We have discussed that, while our main deliverable will be a processing plan, it is difficult to plan steps and a workflow without being certain that everything is accounted for.

We are both working from the documentation we have -- a large Collection Overview that lists (hopefully) everything in the boxes, the bill of lading, and permissions forms -- to create an excel spreadsheet that we can then use to tick stuff off as we open the boxes.  The Collection Overview is pretty exhaustive, but not very clear.  For example, there are box notations for some items, but not all, so it is unclear if everything in that section is in the same box or not.  The excel spreadsheet we're plugging into is the same one used for the Print Department inventory.  It has some fields that aren't necessary for us, but the fields we're filling in are: object type, source of data, creator/artist, other name, box title, title, notes, date of publication or creation, and publisher.


The boxes so far seem to represent all of McCurdy's work under one title.  Most of these are for certain books, so, for example, the box titled "The Very Best Christmas Tree" includes a copy of the book, and various prints, proofs, mock-ups, and even correspondence about the publication of the book.  Most of the information we need is found in the Collection Overview, although we also want to supply the name authorities for each author and we may need to research some of the missing publication information (or it may be evident once we crack open the boxes).

Lisa brought up a great point about the research value of this collection -- someone interested in book illustration could see the process from planning to production.

We plan on finishing our halves of the spreadsheets by the time we meet again on Friday.  Then we can start cross-checking our spreadsheet with what we find in the boxes!