After four days away from the Center we were back at sorting with a vengeance.  We had three sections to finish organizing — Biography, TEACCH, and Correspondence — and we made a significant dent!  Only professional correspondence remains.  The rest of the collection is in folders and boxes.

Mary and Kieran started working on the finding aid,

Yes! Creating a finding aid IS as fun as Mary makes it look…

…and Dov began scanning images for our FUSE page.

There is a lot of enthusiasm today! Perhaps the progress is going to our heads…

With only three full days left at the Center it will be a sprint to the end.  Do you think we will finish in time???

Now for the hard part!  Today we started the process of sifting through all of the piles we created yesterday.  We began with the categories we thought would be easiest (published works, conferences, teaching).  Even though these categories were quite well organized to start, it still took us all day!  We looked through the contents of each folder carefully, removed items that weren’t supposed to be kept in the collection (e.g. old receipts, plane tickets, things that weren’t written by Schopler or his direct associates), swapped out paper clips for plastic clips, re-filed the contents into acid-free folders, and organized the folders by date.

So many folders!

After that, the organized folders were placed into acid-free storage boxes.  By the end of the day we had restored some order…

Organization makes Jenn happy!

…but there is still a lot of work to be done!

It might be time for a break…

Our best finds of the day?

Schopler’s ID card

Hmm…I really thought these pieces would go together…

And a sign of the challenges we face…

If Eric Schopler doesn’t know where this belongs…how are we supposed to know?