Doing this job is kind of like going on a scavenger hunt when you don't know what to look for. How can I organize papers until I know what the papers contain? I suppose that is the existential crisis at the heart of all archives work, but still - its hard to know. Maybe this is a professional judgement thing that will come with time?
Today I spent a very long time figuring out who Julia Clark was and where she fit into the story. One of the more easily identifiable chunks of material was a Mount Holyoke class catalog from 1889, multiple pieces of correspondence, and newspaper clippings regarding Mrs. Clark's time in college. It seems that when a classmate died she'd cut out their obituary and check their names off in the alumni directory. The correspondence was with classmates asking for reminiscences. It took me the afternoon to put this all together - was this important? No. Not really - from a research standpoint Mrs. Clark's college stuff was not important at all. The newspaper clippings and the alumni directory were both mass printed - that information was "out there" somewhere. The letters were equally inconsequential. This only dawned on me AFTER I had spent time on it, though. "Mrs. Clark" popped up on a lot of materials, and I thought that because her story took up a proportionally large amount of space in this families papers it was worth spending a lot of time on. I hope this is the kind of professional judgement call that an archivist gets better at recognizing. In the meantime I might have wasted a lot of time.
Mrs. Clark collected obituaries of her classmates...
and methodically marked off their names in her class directory.