So... Just What Do You Do on Tuesdays and Wednesdays?

The Research Room is open on Mondays 9 am to 5 pm; Thursdays 9 am to 5 pm; and on Fridays, 9 am to 3 pm. In fact, we added an additional 8 hours of public service in this department on 2 January. Anyone who pops in to the Research Room on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays can see some of  what we do for our paychecks. But when the Research Room is closed to the public on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, what is it precisely that we do?  

Here's a partial run down of what BDC staff did on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in January.

Grace: Wrote a letter of support for a very worthy archaeology grant application; Prepared and presented a Big Read program about local hurricanes; Arranged and chaired a Beaufort County Historical Resources Consortium meeting; Participated in the South Carolina Archival Association Board Retreat in Columbia and a Library Branch Managers Meeting; Identified speakers and topics for March - May 2016 BDC@ The Branches programs; Wrote a couple press releases to send up the County chain of authority; Designed flyers for the February program; Got some IT troubleshooting training; Collaborated with the Santa Elena History Center exhibit designer and staff from USCB on image identification and selection for upcoming exhibits at those locations; Was Reference Librarian and archivist to title researchers, university professors, family historians, journalists, graduate students, and regular folks just interested in local history; Had 6 Reserve-an-Archivist appointments; Supervised 3 docents and their respective projects; Continued training and supervising the Preservation Associate (who is rapidly approaching the end of her probational period here); Wrote 34 Facebook posts; 4 posts for this blog; and 3 for the Consortium blog plus other things as they came up. 

Ashley: Continued to learn the ins-and-outs and philosophy undergirding what we do in this department; Continued to learn how we help others pursue their interests; Took minutes at the Consortium meeting; Worked on compiling an inventory of the archival collections to get a feel for that part of our holdings; Filled in during my absence in the Research Room and had 2 Reserve-An-Archivist appointments; Digitized and created metadata for more than 200 images as we prepare our 5th collection to be hosted on the Lowcountry Digital Library website and to support our customers plus other things as they came up. 

So even if we're not open to the public, we are always doing library and archival work of some sort to improve our services and interactions with the public, in person, over the web, or through sharing our resources with other community groups and organizations. The ultimate goal? That we preserve and make Beaufort District's long history accessible for current customers and those who will use the collection 50 or 100 years from now.