Nitty Gritty

I spoke about what I’m doing at my internship in general terms before, but I wanted to go into it with some specific examples.

Lately, I’ve been going through a lot of medical supplies.  Three or four donations were made that consisted entirely of equipment, medications, etc. and fortunately just about everything in them was numbered.  Unfortunately:

1. One donation doesn’t have a list of items, just a gift agreement form that says, “1988.26.1-80: mostly medical equipment”.
2. One donation has some items labeled on the gift agreement, but with stretches of objects marked “unidentified medical tool”.
3. There are many boxes that are just full of stuff and took quite a while to go through.  On Tuesday I managed to get through roughly two shelves, when my usual rate is a whole shelving unit.

I documented my process with one of the more tightly packed boxes to give you an idea of what I’m dealing with.

* Ampules (or ampuls, or ampoules) are sealed containers, in this case, of medication.  Medicine ampules tend to be single dosages in glass capsules; most of these came in boxes with little files, so that the narrow neck could be safely broken and the medicine syringed up.

Here’s another set:

There’s a thin space on the left that could be filled in with a bit of archival paper, but because the boxes and tins fit together well there really isn’t that much movement.