This sample is from the Introduction to Archival Enterprise I course. This is a sought-after class as it provides students with a built-in practicum at an archive within Austin. This practicum was extremely valuable as it provided real life hands on experience. The assignment presented to us was to work with a local archive and arrange, process, and archive a personal collection. The archive assigned to our group was set up through the Austin History Center and the collection we were tasked with archiving was the Tom Spencer Papers and Records collection. This collection contained photographs, journals, correspondence, writings, certificates, and video recordings.

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     The experience gained from working with this collection was extensive. This opportunity helped me gain soft skills around communication, especially around constructive criticism.  This was the first time any of the people involved had worked on archiving material and it took a lot of communication to accomplish this goal. A lot of time was spent fixing mistakes and then fixing them again.

Creating a finding aid is something that is very format and language specific. Attention to detail is a must and a trait I had to sharpen when working on this part of the project.

Lastly, to publish this online we were asked to markup our practicum finding aid in XML. This was also a skill that I had little knowledge around and was glad to have had the opportunity to experiment a tiny bit with XML

One side note: Recently our finding aid was used in an article from Austin 360 to talk about Tom Spencer and his current state.