This Morning's Field Trip

This morning I did not go to the Oral History Center to do my volunteer work. Instead, I went out to the actual Idaho Archives. The archives are kept up by volunteers and archivists from the Idaho State Historical Society.

I think I have found my calling within the realm of history stuff; the archives rocked. Idaho's achives are getting a new building within the year and so there is much work to be done. There are aisles upon aisles of boxes of stuff just waiting to be sorted and indexed. The guy who took me on a tour of the place considers everyday that he comes to work Christmas, in the sense that with each new box of stuff he goes through, he finds new things. I felt the same way while I was there.

The archives were split into a few different sections. The coolest was the manuscript section. Manuscripts in the historical sense are not just the prepublished writings of authors, they are any piece of material that comes from private citizens. This includes photo albums, diaries, scrap books, you name it.

There was also a room that when the door closed, the oxygen would be siphoned out in an effort to preserve the records in it and to prevent fires. All in all, the Idaho archives were very cool....at least if you are a history nerd like me. I am thinking that I may start volunteering there as well. I think archival work is something I would greatly enjoy and I think I would be good at it to. It would basically be like sorting my mp3s only with papers instead of music.