As we enter 2009 — and before I get lost once again in the maze of a busy academic schedule — I thought I’d post a few items on the projects I completed this fall and the projects that are up for the spring semester.

My tenure as an intern at Northeastern University’s Archives will continue through the spring, this time as an official internship requirement for my second archives class at Simmons. Just today, I published the last finding aid for the small collections I processed this fall to make them available for research. In addition to my first, miniscule collection the Albert Hale Waite papers, I also processed the collection of Milburn Devenney, a social worker and AIDS/HIV activist from the Boston area, documents related to the history of Northeastern’s Disability Resource Center and course notes from the history department’s Western Civilization class.

Next week I will begin work on a much larger collection, the Carmen A. Pola papers. Ms. Pola is a Boston-area community activist who worked for a number of different social justice organizations such as Roxbury Unites for Families and Children and the Puerto Rican Festival. She served in the administration of Boston mayor Ray Flynn during the 1980s. We have over thirty boxes of unprocessed documents and photographs that I will be responsible for organizing so that researchers will have meaningful access to the contents of the collection. Wish me luck and watch for the results sometime this summer!

This morning I finished and published my first online archival finding aid as part of my internship at Northeastern Archives. It involved a lot of fancy footwork with Microsoft Word macros and Dreamweaver . . . but the important thing in the end was that it worked and the papers of one Albert Hale Waite (graduate of Northeastern’s School of Law, class of 1933) are now fully processed and accessible for research. You can view the finding aid for Mr. Waite here.