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Volunteers in Archives



For the past two years we've had groups of Elderhostel and Elfun (GE
employees) volunteers come in and work on our Civil War manuscripts
collection.  They primarily work on transcribing, indexing, and
re-housing collections.  The downside is that they're only here for a
week at a time, but now that our program is established we're getting a
lot of returnees so the amount of training required has decreased.  We
also have two-year round volunteers.  We have one man who hangs new
paintings, sets up for special events, etc.  The other man transcribes,
indexes, and re-houses collections.  Occasionally, we get volunteers for
single projects.  For example, my dean's son came in and cleaned our
hobbit collection.  Being nine years old, his hands were small enough to
reach all of the small crevices in the wood carvings.

We've been fortunate to have excellent volunteers.  Because I have so
many volunteers coming and going (esp. with Elderhostel and Elfun), I
have set up a Filemaker database to track the status of volunteer
projects and to track hours worked by my volunteers. This has been a
real time-saver.

Since I am the only paid full-time staff person, volunteers help with
projects that I would never have time to complete.  The key is finding
the right task for the right person.  I had one Elderhostel volunteer
who found transcribing the most boring task imaginable, so I put him to
work re-housing a collection.  His wife transcribed the documents once
they had been re-housed.  Then together they wrote a biographical sketch
for the collection.

Julie Holcomb
--
Julie Holcomb, Archivist
Navarro College
3200 W. 7th Ave.
Corsicana, Texas 75110
Internet: jholc@nav.cc.tx.us
Phone: 903-875-7438
Fax: 903-874-4636

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