Masters Thesis

Archival Arrangement and Description of the Judge Leopold Justi Collection

Purpose of the Study: To calendar the published materials contained within the Judge Leopold Justi Collection and provide a reference which, by explaining the processes that preceded calendaring and the procedures involved in the calendaring process, will guide those who will continue the calendaring process for other materials contained within the collection. Procedure: To select and organize items in this collection, donated in June, 1992, by Judge Leopold Justi's grand-nephew, Roland Todd, and his wife, to the archives of the Sonoma State University Ruben Salazar Library. Guides used were Archives and Manuscripts: Arrangement and Description by David B. Gracy, Archives & Manuscripts: Surveys, by John A. Fleckner, and Archives and Other Special Collections by Sr. Mary Jane Menzenska. Sandra D. Walton, university archivist, served as consultant. The project demanded discerning how best to organize and make accessible a gift collection of personal papers and artifacts for use in a university archive. A gross inventory of the collection was made to define the categories of materials. Then items from the collection were selected for calendaring, involving systematic description in terms of type of item, title, author, publisher, place of publication, printer, date, page numbers and size, contents, color and condition, box number, item number and calendar date. Findings: The sixteen original containers holding the collection were in very poor condition due to moisture and rodent damage. The only materials in chronological order to be found in any of the original sixteen boxes were transferred to Box 28 and Box 35. These materials were correspondence pertaining to the wine industry that had been put into chronologically ordered folders by William F. Heintz. The immensity of the collection necessitated expanding the number of containers first to twenty-six and then to thirty-nine. The items calendared represented the interests of Judge Leopold Justi, with the emphasis largely on agricultural materials related to farming. It was interesting to discover materials published after 1946 (the year of Justi's death); this collection has been added to by persons other than Justi. Conclusion At this point, many significant steps of the archival process remain to be accomplished with the Judge Leopold Justi Collection. Before further organization is done, it is recommended that the collection be fumigated. After this is performed, the items will need to be sorted by document type, and within each type according to date (where appropriate) or alphabetical order (for undated items). Finally, it will be necessary to prepare a group description in the form of a register or an inventory, possibly augmented by a more detailed shelf list or calendar for particularly important manuscripts, as a finding aid to assist the public in location of specific items in the collection.

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