In March, Kristen Morales, the 2022-2023 President of the Chase Street Elementary School Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) donated boxes of scrapbooks and materials created by the PTO, the Athens City Education Association, and the Clarke County Education Association to the Athens-Clarke County Library’s Heritage Room. The scrapbooks and materials contained a range of items including pictures of the Chase Street school building and students, programs and flyers for PTO-hosted events, PTO board and Education Association directory lists, press clippings and correspondence for both organizations, and even art.
The history of Chase Street Elementary School is captured in these materials. Chase Street Elementary School first opened its doors to the Boulevard neighborhood as Chase Street School in 1922. The Chase PTO’s scrapbooks share the school’s history starting soon after in 1926 all the way up to 2015. Memorialized in the pages are events like construction efforts in 1928 (a playground addition) and 2008 (renovations and a wing addition), the integration of the teaching staff and student body in 1966, and a near-century of community events. The materials represent a time capsule for the Chase Street community.
Like the Chase Street Elementary School Parent Teacher Organization collection, I also arrived at the Heritage Room in March. I am Jordan, the summer archival processing intern at the Heritage Room. I was born and raised in Athens, Georgia, and recently returned after graduating from Vanderbilt University in May 2022. I returned to Athens to spend a gap year gaining experience working with archives, which made the Heritage Room the ideal final stop for my year of learning. The Chase Street PTO collection was my first Heritage Room project of the summer. I was responsible for the collection from the point of its donation to the end product of a published resource page on Archive Space. As a newcomer to the library game, I recognized this project as a great opportunity to learn the standards and expectations of archival processing.
When I first received the materials, I was amazed by the contents of the scrapbook pages. I worked to familiarize myself with the contents of all 22 items in the collection. While creating an accession record for the materials, I was able to organize them into two series: the Chase Street Elementary Parent Teacher Organization series (1926-2015)–which includes 18 scrapbooks–and the Athens City and Clarke County Education Association series (1942-1964)–which includes one scrapbook and two bound books. This collection structure led me to draft the finding aid and resource record for the collection.
My real deep dive in the collection began when my supervisor, Ashley Shull, the Archives and Special Collections Coordinator at the Heritage Room and Morales applied for and were later awarded the 2023/2024 DLG Competitive Digitization grant from the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) to digitize the Series 1 Chase Street PTO scrapbooks. The grant provided an opportunity to further preserve the scrapbooks. In order to prepare for digitization, Ashley and I had to ensure we understood every piece of each scrapbook we sent off to be digitized by the DLG. Essentially, this amounted to us spending a day in the Heritage Room combing through each page of each scrapbook recording the number of pages in each book, any additional images needed for multi-page handouts attached to scrapbook pages, and measuring each book to determine how best to capture them (single pages vs. spread layout). And all this information was of course recorded in several detailed spreadsheets. The work was tedious, but necessary to understand how to best capture the scrapbooks and every picture or handout piece included in their pages.
On July 6th, we took a field trip to the DLG office at the University of Georgia Main Library to drop the books off for digitization. The amazing DLG staff was kind enough to offer me a tour of their facility and imaging equipment. It was truly a pleasure. Now the scrapbooks are being digitized as my internship with the Heritage Room comes to a close. I look forward to seeing how the Chase Street Parent Teacher Organization collection is used and shared amongst the Chase Street and Athens communities. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunities I gained over this summer with the Heritage Room.
Athens: In Time 