4th Weeks: Meeting in the Stacks

During my fourth week at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, I was assigned a new project relating to dozens of boxes from the Pearl River Development Basin, a state agency that was recently decommissioned. The amount of unorganized information caused the department to assign many employees to work on this project. In order to assign me part of the project, everyone from Government Records took a field trip down to the stacks to hold a spontaneous and informal department meeting. Basically, everyone getting away from their desk was the highlight of the day.

The meeting consisted of us standing around dozens of boxes trying to give me something to do. We reviewed what everyone was currently working on, what boxes needed to be prioritized, and what boxes contained information I could work with without overlapping the work of others. It was incredibly informal and transitioned from giving me work to an effort to understand what was stored in each box.

It was decided that I would work with minutes of agency meetings. This spurred a discussion on which boxes contained only minutes, so that we would not be working out of the same boxes.

The meeting ended with each of us leaving the stacks with a cart filled with boxes. The result was that everyone was on the same page and knew what the other were doing. It was a good meeting and a great field trip to the stacks. However, we managed to ignore dozens of boxes relating to the Pearl River Development Basin because we simple did not want to or have the time to spend all day on what was basically a field trip. The conclusion was most of the boxes remained in the stacks for another day.