I was pretty eager to get my space boots blown by the solar wind of the Archives - (my attempt) to stick with the outer space metaphors - so I entered Vera at about 1:00PM. The door was locked and it was darker inside than usual, but thankfully both Shannon and Vanessa were near the door and opened it for me.
Before my scheduled interview with Terri, I managed to complete the high-level inventory of the posters organized in the cardboard Utrecht folders. Additionally, I stacked them with the oldest date on the top down to the most recent on the shelf below (2009 and 2008), which sit above all the non-chronologically titled folders. This will allow Terri easy access in case she needs to add more posters to the 2009 folder.
I gave myself a bit of time before interviewing Terri to look over and print out my questions. I decided my interview with her would be a sort of testing ground for my upcoming interviews with staff.
So as we know, Terri is the Admin Archives Intern. Her general duties involve answering the phone, maintaining the front desk, assisting with various inventories (e.g. shirts), updating the wall calendar, and checking for press articles. 
This last task is where the "Archives" aspect of position comes in. Basically, she goes through The Stranger and Seattle Weekly each week to find write-ups on bands and or Vera itself. She cuts the out, scans them and places them into the clear bin pictured at the left in the center of the image with the pink label. She also scans Vera Propaganda materials and places them into this bin. It is organized by year with contents ranging from 2001 to the present.
Finally, above this bin, is the shallow blue box called "Archive," in which various staff will place materials - such as propaganda - to be archived by Terri.
After this she showed me the digital archives itself - as it is organized via Windows Explorer. This may be hard to view in the blog itself so if you click the image you can view a larger version. Basically, as you can see there is not an entirely standardized system for organizing photos: it has changed over the years. This is an issue that I will try to tackle in the coming months.
After Terri showed me the various series and their sub categories, she gave me a few suggestions regarding future archival procedures. She thought it would be a good idea to have a photographer sign-in sheet for shows to more easily obtain photographs from shows and wants there to be a better definition of "Propaganda."
I then had a few thoughts on the overall structure of the interview. I found that it was easy for answers to one question to overlap into answers for other questions before I would have a chance to ask them. Furthermore, I found taking notes while Terri was answering questions to be a bit distracting and disruptive to the flow of the interview. I am now considering using my digital voice recorder for the interviews from which i will extract and organize the information recorded in each interview.
After this, I dived into the digital archives on my own for about an hour. I spent most of my time looking at the way in which the Press files have been organized over the years. Pictured to the left, are my rough notes on this so far. I intend have a formal map of this structure posted on the wiki once I have finished going through it.Summary:
*Inventory
- Completed the general "high-level" inventory of the posters in the cardboard Utrecht folders
- The folders are arranged starting with 1999 at the top down through 2006 and on the shelf
below I placed the folders for 2008 and 2009 and the remaining miscellaneous and non-vera
folders.
3:30pm - Interview with Terri
*Walk-through
- Terri checks the Stranger and Seattle Weekly each week for any write-ups on bands playing
at Vera or about Vera itself.
- She scans all press articles and organizes them into the digital archives and places the hard
copies into a bin behind the front desk and does the same for all propaganda materials.
- For event posters she scans them and places them into the appropriate folder in physical
archives.
*Concerns
- the organization of the digital archives is not standard over the years - it has changed quite
significantly.
- there is also no standard scanning format, jpeg, pdf, and tiff are all present - the latter being
the most recent.
- need for standard vocabulary and metadata attachment - for searchability
*Thoughts: Post-Interview
- easy to get off track
- taking notes can disrupt the flow
- use a voice recorder for future interviews?
4:00pm In the Archives
*Digital Inventory
- I began to take screen shots of the file structure and notes on how the organizational
structure for press changes over the years.
- A more formal representation of the digital archives organizational structure is forthcoming.
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