As a practicum for an archives class at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information (Archival Enterprise I) I processed a collection of records belonging to the Austin Volunteer Fire Department, for the years 1868-1916. The records consisted of ledgers and other record volumes, administrative papers, photographs, and ephemera and artifacts belonging to firemen.

The practicum involved working with a partner to:

• Create an Appraisal Report and Processing Plan
• Create a finding aid
• Encode the finding aid with EAD (a type of XML)
• Rearrange and rebox the records for ease of research and preservation.

Check out the finding aid my partner and I created on TARO (Texas Archival Resources Online).