About a week ago, I sent an email to all participating repositories regarding scheduling preferences for processing–a tricky request since I am essentially asking people to make decisions as much as two years in advance.  Despite that, the answers are trickling in, and I am, slowly but surely, filling the schedule.

Scheduling at this early stage has distinct advantages for me:  I can determine how many student workers I need to hire based on the number of institutions citing a particular semester as most convenient and I can try to make certain that every institution has a fair and appropriate amount of time penciled in.  The overall schedule also provides hard deadlines for the project team to strive for and achieve.  With the ambitious goals of this project and the time constraints of 27 months, falling behind on our deadlines at one repository could prove disastrous.   Finally, after processing the first semester, I will be able to reevaluate the overall schedule and determine if the original plan is achievable.

I believe that it is also advantageous for the institutions to schedule early.  If supplies will be necessary for processing, the institution has a bit of time to adjust future budgets.  Further, the grant for this project requires that each institution will contribute 10% staff time to the project.  As we all know, most staff at libraries, archives and museums could use approximately 110% extra time to achieve all that they would like, so scheduling that 10% will be difficult.

Happily, two institutions have been scheduled for the first semester–thank you Drexel University and Haverford College for volunteering!  Both institutions already have instances of the Archivists’ Toolkit installed which allows the project team a little more time in determining the best ways to install the program at roughly 20 Philadelphia area repositories, each with unique information technology set-ups.

The Wagner Free Institute for Science is scheduled for Spring 2010 and both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Library Company of Philadelphia are scheduled for Fall 2010.  The University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library has agreed to be among the first repositories for which EAD conversion of existing finding aids will be performed.

Updates will be provided as I schedule more repositories!