Most of my day was spent organizing the documents in the yearly budgets; each folder needed to be arranged chronologically. This is a slow process even though it doesn’t seem like it should be. In some cases, there were several project proposals from different years grouped together but with nothing to tell me why. If projects were being approved for a specific fiscal year, then why are there old proposals from as much as a decade before there. Hmmm…a conundrum–was this on purpose or did someone just stick proposals into different folders. If it was an isolated case, I might have concluded that it was an isolated case, but since it happened in almost every folder I encountered I knew there was something else going on. I asked Liz and she explained that many times project proposals will stay active for years because of budget constraints, so while a proposal was submitted in 1980, it may not be funded until years later. I did what I thought was best and wrapped the proposals that were together in their original order so show that this arrangement was on purpose.
Our big triumph for the day was an enthusiastic response from Acadia National Park regarding found park project files. When I began this internship I was told that Acadia was looking for some specific project files from a study on vegetation management on three of the mountains in the park. I found what I thought was a match in September and flagged them for Liz to confirm. After she looked through the folder I flagged, she suspected that I had found the right study and emailed Acadia. We received a happy email in return: “BINGO!!!!” in purple and pink letters. They are clearly thrilled that I found the data sheets and project information they were missing. So these will be packed up and sent to the park asap.
As I am arranging the Series I. Administrative, subseries i. Fiscal Year Budgets and Projects, Liz is getting down to the nitty gritty weeding out of files. We are running out of time and since she has decades of experience in government records management, she has taken over the deep weeding. She can pretty much tell at a glance whether a record is permanent or not, whereas I agonize over it. When she runs across an interesting item, she brings it to me to explain why it stays or goes to help me understand the process more. I truly appreciate that because when I passed through these records the first time, I was extremely cautious and erred on the side of keeping files that were not obvious dispositions.
As this is my tenth and last blog post for this project, I would like to thank you all for reading and for the support. This project has brought me great joy and some frustrations–all totally worth it. Working with Liz Bank has been a privilege and she made an unwieldy project a great learning experience and fun.
Cheers,
Corinne
Archives in Turn: Interns in Archives 
How did you like the time you spent at the NPS? What were your favorite parts? Could you see yourself working in a place like that at some point?
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I loved the processing project for the NPS. The records themselves were interesting and so many of the reports I skimmed only made me want to read them more thoroughly. Especially the ones that documented climate changes in the early 80s. I could definitely see myself working with government records, and the NPS. The work they do to save cultural and natural resources is so important.
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