The Farmhouse

I started my work at Loomis Village back in June. In the attic of the farmhouse there were more than a dozen boxes set aside that needed to be looked at. When I first went up, I was with Rob and Danielle, both from SCUA (special collections and university archives). They gave me my instructions and I started doing a rough sort!

Instead of taking the whole lot of boxes up to UMass, I went through each box and took out the ones that held materials that we won't be taking to the archives. Since what we want is the social history, there are certain things that stuck out to me as being important. A short list of examples:

1. Board meeting minutes

2. All resident meeting minutes from groups like LARA

3. Marketing materials

4. Blueprints and plans for new acquisitions (mainly Loomis Village)

5. Photographs

6. Administrative documents and memos

Those are the main things that I was finding. One important thing worth noting is how they were all kept together. For the most part, the boxes in the attic were kept according to the person who had been keeping the boxes. A couple of them are actually labeled with names of adminstrators/assistants. Normally, when a collection is being processed it gets split up into 'series'. These are categories that make it easier for a researcher to find what they are looking for, but it also reflects the structure of the entity/organization. In this instance, the organization of the documents does not give a clear picture of what the series should be.

After talking with Rob and Danielle, we came up with two options for the series:

Choice A

1. Board of Directors

2. Administration

3. Finance Committee (tentative)

4. Facilities

5. Marketing/Advertising

6. Residential Life

Choice B

1. Loomis Communities Administration

2. Loomis House

3. Loomis Village

4. Applewood

5. Reeds Landing

While choice A works as a set of "classic" series, choice B is probably the way to go in this case. I still have to talk to Rob and confirm what he and Danielle want to do, but what I looked at as the determining factor was the volume of documents from each community. Since each community has kept its own documents (they have never been consolidated at one location) and there is a good amount at each location, that says a lot about how Loomis Communities works as an organization. We will most likely end up keeping each of the communities separate as they have been kept in the past.

This will be decided for my next post, along with more details on what is coming from Applewood and Reeds Landing, and the developments on the boxes from Loomis Village.

Til then!