Entrance to The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health. Photograph courtesy of The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives.
Project staff at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions are well into processing three of the four personal paper collections that were selected to be part of the CLIR project to process hidden special collections. This is a partnership project with Countway Library at Harvard Medical School, “Private Practices, Public Health,” to provide access to records of seven leaders in the field of public health. The three collections in process at the Chesney Medical Archives are the papers of Frank Polk, an early AIDS researcher; William and Miriam Hardy, audiologists instrumental in initiating the practice and science of screening young children for hearing loss; and Barbara Starfield, a pediatrician and leader in promoting primary care who researched health systems and brought attention to health equity.
The Polk papers, totaling 25 boxes, 31 cubic feet of material, are completely arranged and the collection description is nearly complete. Two Johns Hopkins student assistants, Faith Owhonda, a junior in Public Health, and Bill Rothkopf, a senior in Mechanical Engineering, have refoldered, entered folder data, and created series records in the database for the bulk of the collection, with just one series remaining. The next step will be to finish identifying and begin screening the collection for private and confidential information, a requirement of HIPAA compliant repositories like the Chesney Medical Archives.
The Hardy collection totals 23 boxes, approximately 28 cubic feet. The Chesney Medical Archives has been fortunate in obtaining a graduate student in the field of History who has worked at the National Archives, Kate Sohasky, to assist in implementing the arrangement. Kate has finished the initial sort of records by series, no small feat as this is a highly complex collection that required a full archivist imposed arrangement. Kate has also conducted the background research on the Hardys and their departments, which over the years changed names and organizational location. She has written the biographical history of both William and Miriam Pauls Hardy.
Two other student assistants, Tony Bai and Alyssa Perkinson, both seniors in International Studies, have conducted an inventory of the Starfield collection and are about three fourths of the way through refoldering and listing folders in the archives’ database. This is the largest collection being processed as part of the CLIR grant project, comprising 76 boxes, 91 cubic feet of materials and an additional set of electronic records (8 gigabytes) including emails, laptop files, and office files. Alyssa has conducting research for the biographical history of Starfield.
An update on the fourth collection, the papers of nutrition scientist E.V. McCollum, will follow later in the year.
All of our project staff including the Principle Investigator and Collections Management Archivist, Phoebe Evans Letocha; the Project Archivist, Linda Klouzal; and the five student assistants, have been keeping track of the hours we spend on processing tasks, using the Access Metrics Database tool provided by Countway Medical Library, as part of our collaborative effort with Countway to gather accurate archival processing metrics for medical collections.
Hiring, training, and supervising student assistants has been a significant component of this project to date. Two of our student assistants, Kate Sohasky and Alyssa Perkinson, have agreed to write about their experiences working with their respective collections. Each works with the papers of people whose work and legacy in the field of Public Health relate to her own area of research interest.