Chester E. Smolski photographic slides and publications (MSS.41)
Special Collections
Rhode Island College600 Mount Pleasant Ave
Providence, RI, 02908
Tel: 401-456-8380
email:digitalcommons@ric.edu
Administrative Information
| ABOUT THE COLLECTION | |
| Processing information: | The collection was processed between February 2020 and April 2021 by Erica Florenz, a Special Collections Assistant supervised by Molly Bruce Patterson, Digital Archivist & Special Collections Librarian.Each box and carousel that originally held the slides was labelled by Smolski with geographical locations or subjects. Some slide boxes contained color coded keys for slide subjects representing different themes of geography. Most individual slides were clearly labelled and grouped together by location or subject if unlabeled. The newspaper columns and other materials provided were numbered and came with a detailed inventory and were housed in a separate box.Shortly after the collection was donated in 2009, the library’s Digital Initiatives staff digitized, numbered, and rehoused over half of the slides into archival slide boxes in a manner that retained their original order. At this time, handwritten inventories of original slide boxes were created before slides were rehoused.Final processing of the collection began in February 2020. The remaining carousels and slide boxes were inventoried and numbered, and photos were taken of every box to document the collection’s original order. We decided to organize all the slides by geographic location in order to facilitate access and discovery. Slides were sorted and arranged into series by region, then by location alphabetically, and then by slide number. By the end of the final arrangement, there were two slide boxes containing unidentified slides. Newspaper columns were organized by publication and then chronologically.Overall, the collection is in good condition. Slides are now stored in acid free slide boxes. Paper clips and extra Xerox copies provided with original newspaper clippings were removed and discarded, leaving at most one copy per article. We kept the original newspaper clippings but disposed of the What’s News at Rhode Island College because they were already held in the archives. Newspaper clippings and research files were rehoused in acid free folders, labelled, and placed into archival boxes. |
| ABOUT THE FINDING AID | |
| Author: | Finding aid prepared by Erica Florenz. |
| Encoding: | This finding aid was encoded by Molly Bruce Patterson, 2021 |
| Descriptive rules: | Finding aid based on Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) |
