The First Day

In the beginning, there was ZAPP. I arrived a few minutes before 1:00 pm just after having spent the previous hour haggling for a new flash at various camera shops downtown. I tinkered with my new flash while I waited for Nora to wrap up a meeting - which I had mistaken as a meeting intended for me just moments before. Then there was light.

Nora first gave me the tour of the house and introduced me to the staff. After this, I acquired a personal file folder to be entered into the ZAPP front desk along with a notepad. We then sat at an elongated meeting table and Nora presented me with the outline of my responsibilities, which I read, signed, and dated. For the next hour or so she went over the outline with me and elaborated on each point.

Basically, I will be getting to know the collection, cataloging it on the electronic database, re-shelving Zines, removing and archiving extras to make room for new Zines, doing grant research and support, and assisting in any way I can to improve overall archival procedures. I will also be focusing specifically on the Personal Zines section from M through Z.

After my (re) introduction at ZAPP, I made my way over to the Vera Project for my 5 to 8pm shift there. I arrived to find both Josh and Dustin at the front desk. The three of us proceeded to the conference room to discuss the specifics of the outline for my responsibilities at Vera as well as my goals and expectations.

My tasks at Vera will be similar to those at ZAPP, except I will be working with different materials (posters, photographs, newsprint, magazines, and some digital files), and researching/implementing a new system as a opposed to working with an existing one. I will also be interviewing the staff to determine what kind of system would best meet their needs. Josh gave me all sorts of pointers to get me started with this - including a text titled:Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives.

Around 6:30 or so, Josh took me back to the Archive room: essentially a small L-shaped walk-in closet. I will tentatively call this the "Boot Room" for easy referencing.

As you can see, the archive room looks like a typical closet: random boxes and odd shaped items arranged in no particular order. The shelf shown here I will call the "Shin Shelf." Now, I actually took this picture after Josh and I made a few quick adjustments after having found one of the cardboard Utrecht poster folders completely open on the floor with some of the posters falling out. The folders tucked away in the lower left hand corner of the image (next to heel shelf) are the one's we found open and previously set in the area captured in the lower right of this image.

It became my primary goal for the evening to at least get a majority of these folders off the floor and lying flat on one of the shelves. So I began examining the existing boxes on the shelves, determined what items were related, then consolidated and reorganized them to open up some space.

Given my time constraints, the lack of nourishment, and the migraine that had been slowly intensifying throughout the day I decided to quickly wrap things up by 8pm.

I also took a picture of the "heel" section.