During my fall 2019 volunteer term at the Leonard G. McCann Archives at the Vancouver Maritime Museum (VMM), I applied knowledge from my archival courses at UBC—especially Advanced Arrangement and Description of Archival Documents—and developed my archival processing skills. Here, I arranged, described, and rehoused a personal fonds (the William M. Reid fonds, VMM66) and a series of over 100 St. Roch plans (part of the VMM Ship Plan collection, VMM50.11). Using Rules for Archival Description and naval research, I wrote and input thorough and user-friendly descriptions into VMM’s online database hosted by CollectiveAccess.
Likewise, my practical experience at VMM enabled me to greater reflect on arrangement and description practices and archival theory discussed in my subsequent coursework at UBC—particularly, Advanced Arrangement and Description of Archival Documents in the subsequent academic term.
