RESEARCH UPDATE

Just got off the phone with Library Director Leora Siegel about visiting the Chicago Botanic Garden archive. Leora green-lighted my visit for October 21 at 1o a.m.! I am very excited. This will just be preliminary findings trip to get a feel for the state of the archive and their holdings. In the mean time I'm going to have to talk with my advisor about what types of records I should be looking for and about coming up with a searchable list of topics. The CBG's archive is pretty rough, there isn't a finding aid yet and the topics are searchable via Excel (sigh, wouldn't it be cool if they hired me to catalog?), so I am going to have to spend some serious time there, which means I should be as organized as possible before I go.

I haven't been in an institutional archive in over a year, so I'm also going to try and ask other grad students around the department for tips and advice on prelim visits. Any words of wisdom are welcome!