Manuals, manuals and more manuals!
My job as project manager of the PACSCL/CLIR “Hidden Collections in the Philadelphia Area: A Consortial Processing Cataloging Initiative” Project began on July 8. On that day, I immersed myself in trying to figure out how to achieve the goals of this ambitious and amazing project which calls for minimally processing approximately 138 collections containing materials ranging from the 15th to the 21st centuries and converting approximately 80 non standard finding aids into Encoded Archival Description (EAD) during a two year time frame. On top of that, this project is implementing the Archivists’ Toolkit and coordinating 24 repositories’ EAD finding aids. On the up side, there was an enormous quantity of work done on this project before I even arrived. This project follows the PACSCL Survey Initiative Project which assessed unprocessed collections at 22 participating collections. In addition to assigning research value to collections (which was used in identifying candidate collections for the processing project), the surveyors created basic collection level records for every collection in this project.
There is still a lot to do! I am creating a minimal processing manual, the Archivists’ Toolkit guide, a training manual for our processing force (graduate and undergraduate students) and evaluation forms for students and for repositories in order to improve workflow. Ultimately, this project is intended as an experiment: to understand how minimal processing works, how the Archivists’ Toolkit can be implemented to create a union catalog, and how consortial efforts might bring about extraordinary results in making primary source resources available to researchers. Further, if we succeed (and I intend to succeed), this experimental effort may be used as a model for other institutions struggling to reduce their backlog and make their collections known to the public.
As the project continues, this space will be used for processor notes, project archivist notes and my more general comments about the status of the project, the problems we encounter, the solutions we discover and the successes that we achieve.