I'm proud to say that we have completed our new and up-to-date subbasement archive inventory. A big thanks to Danny, Duncan, Oumar, Khalil, and Jeffery for all their help in actually taking inventory of Teachers College's archival materials. Actually the inventory was completed a while back but what I have been working the past three weeks on assigning each box in the subbasement with a meta-collection name, a collection name, and a sub-collection name and organizing the inventory by the collections. By doing this the archival documents will be grouped together under categories such as: Department documents, Faculty, Alumni, Administration, Centers, Institutes, Programs, and Students. This will make it easier for a librarian to find archival materials to fulfill patron requests. This will also bring some order to the subbasement, since we haven't had a correct inventory list until now.

Unfortunately we're still using spreadsheets for this inventory but hopefully this inventory can evolve into something more visually pleasing. I believe we can make a visual data map out of this inventory and apply it to the PocketKnowledge browsing section. But I'll have to do a bit more research and the subject, and see if it is even worthwhile to pursue in the first place.

Eventually the library's goal is to have all these archival documents digitized and uploaded to PocketKnowledge, allowing the historical documents of Teachers College to be all online. This will allow us to show off our archival materials to more people around the world and have them available for researchers, and anyone else who's interested. The completion of this inventory is the first step to this goal.