The Scholarly Life and the Archival Life: An Exploratory Study of the Sarah Lois Wadley Diary and Its Usage by Historians

As documents of complicated socio-cultural standing, women's diaries frustrate traditional approaches to archival description and speak to the subjective nature of the practice. This exploratory study traces the scholarly life of the Southern Historical Collection's Sarah Lois Wadley diary in relation to its finding aid and to significant events in its archival existence. It follows the citation of 197 of the diary's dated entries across 37 historical books and statistically analyzes the usage of described entries versus the usage of non-described entries in order to explore the connection between archival description and scholarly interpretation. In addition to arriving at correlations that demonstrate digitization and encoding's positive effect on access, the study discusses the intersection between historical and archival judgment and also the potential for descriptive practices to embrace collaboration.Master of Science in Library Scienc