“An archivist of some kind that will come to my house after I am gone” – the Lucinda Bunnen Papers

by Cori Williams, Collection Services Processing Intern, Lucinda Bunnen papers.

This is the fifth post in a series on the accessioning and processing of the Lucinda Bunnen Papers.

Today I accomplished something I had desired to do for a while: I managed to get the entirety of Lucinda’s collection onto one floor. To work on this project, I divided the collection mentally into “papers” and “photographic prints” so as not to be completely overwhelmed. Today marks the moment where I begin shifting the sorted and processed papers from my cubicle and cycle in the numerous print boxes. While processing, I have simultaneously been working on a new finding aid to correspond to the entirety of the collection. While ultimately the boxes will be numbered, I quickly realized I needed to use a lettering system so that upon finding an unexpected folder I didn’t need to go down the whole list and renumber everything. That will be the finish line- numbering the boxes in numerical order to correspond to the finding aid, an unnecessary but desirable goal for me. (Read: I like a bit of order and things in their place.) I currently have the collection arranged into 9 groups: Art, Personal Papers, Printed Materials, Philanthropy, Collecting, Correspondence, Subject Files, Prints, and Audio Visual. Each group will also have a corresponding scope note that will detail its contents. As noted in a previous blog post, my inclination is to categorize things by subject or format versus chronologically. However, as the collection gets processed more granularly, subject folders or other specifics can be arranged chronologically or alphabetically. This is my current working container list for “Art”. Apart from the unfortunate GGG box, everything seems standardized and neat:

A bit unlike this is a section pulled from the “Subject Files” series:

In short, the Subject Files series covers projects, interests, and collections kept by Lucinda. Once most all the papers were neatly sorted into their categories, I had a few piles or single items left out that didn’t fit under the umbrella of a pre-existing series. For example, “Binder with film shot list and Kudzu”. To get these papers better sorted, the use of “Subject Files” as a series came into play. With this heading, the remaining documents could get sorted by what they were covering versus having a box titled miscellaneous under the “Collecting” or “Printed Materials” series.

The finding aid seems to be like a menu. If you are a pescatarian it would be more helpful to have a division between fish and other meat to quickly sort out the dishes you can eat. However, even if you know you can eat it, some items might be more appealing due to your knowledge of the fish. In this example, salmon represents the High Museum and hogfish (which you would know if you were familiar with the Florida Keys) represents Public Domain. Within the organization of the menu, you know you can eat it, but might be less inclined to since you don’t know much about it.

I was unfamiliar with Public Domain. It was a stack of printed materials that didn’t have a date, or much information attached.

 

I was able to piece together that these papers belonged with others I had had a hard time categorizing:

After making the connection, I was able to start to do some google searches to try to find more information. A google search of “Atlanta public domain networking Charles Prince” didn’t yield very helpful results:

However, I decided to take one of the email addresses and simply search www.pd.org . Under the about: PD section of I saw that Lubo Fund Inc. was thanked for their support over the decades, and the connection was made. The Lubo Fund is Lucinda’s foundation that she created to help support projects of interest.

So, there you have it. This previously unknown stack of printed materials did tie back to Lucinda. I had never heard about Public Domain, and although they don’t seem to be producing new content, their website has a good archive of materials including podcasts, projects, essays, etc. This is something I would have never known about had I not found it within Lucinda’s collection. While researchers might be more inclined to look through more known material, I hope they also take the time to consider the entirety of what Lucinda collected. At the end of the day the one thing all these materials have in common is her.