Since my last update on the Richard Burr Congressional Collection, I have been hard at work putting the finishing touches on the collection. Read my previous blog posts documenting this project: Planning and Processing of the Richard Burr Collection, Richard Burr Collection Processing Update, and An Inside Look at Senator Richard Burr’s Memorabilia Collection.

I’ll start with the good news: the finding aid has been published online and the collection is officially available for research! The finding aid includes summaries of each series in the collection as well as a detailed folder-level inventory for each box. There is also a biographical note for Richard Burr as well as other information about accessing the collection. This finding aid is the culmination of almost three years of work on this project, and hopefully it will make the collection easily navigable for researchers (and reference archivists) in the years to come.

In addition to finalizing the finding aid, I have spent most of my time this spring and summer working on the digital files in the collection–we received two hard drives worth of materials, totaling around 250 GB of data. There are legislative files, videos of speeches and interviews, an extensive photo collection, press releases, administrative files, correspondence files, and much more included in the digital archive. Most of these records are from Burr’s time in the Senate, which makes them important in filling gaps in the paper records which are primarily from his time in the House. During the spring semester, we welcomed Dean Myers, former Deputy Chief of Staff for Richard Burr’s Winston-Salem office, as a volunteer to write metadata for the digital photo collection. We are so grateful that he was willing to help with this project–his expertise will greatly enhance access to these images. Additionally, I have been working with my colleagues in SCA to arrange, describe, and provide access to the digital collection (as always, with the help of our amazing SCA student workers). A digital collection of this size and nature is a first for SCA and comes with its fair share of challenges that we will continue to work through.

And of course, there have been loose ends to wrap up the physical collection as well. Together with our students, I have made sure that each folder in the collection is properly labeled and numbered and that each box is labeled. I also double checked each box with the finished finding aid and made sure to fix any lingering issues. The physical collection started at around 500 linear feet, and after processing it sits at around 325 linear feet. Many, many thanks to all my student workers who worked on this project over the past three years–I could not have done it without them. Thanks also to the entire SCA team, who have all helped me in one way or another along the way. And, to anyone interested in accessing this collection, feel free to email us at archives@wfu.edu to start your research!