Knowing that we will be losing 3 of 4 of our original student processors at the beginning of June, Courtney and I began planning for an almost entirely new team and revisited our training scheme armed with the knowledge and experience that comes from working with collections and our processors for eight months.  Needless to say, we approached this training session a little differently.

Courtney worked on our slide presentation, fine-tuning and further developing ideas and issues that we realized we had not covered fully enough in the first training session.  She also developed a training slide show on the Archivists’ Toolkit which I think will be useful not just to our student processors, but to the larger archival community.

One other thing we had decided immediately after the first training was that we really needed to find training collections that were small enough to complete in the two-days of hands-on training.  We asked Matt Herbison, Director of the  Independence Seaport Museum J. Welles Henderson Archives and Library, if he was willing to host the training, and he generously agreed and helped select collections for processing.  Our wish list for the collections included:  size (the collection needs to be small enough that a two person team can process the collection and enter the finding aid into the Archivists’ Toolkit in 2 days) and complexity (the collection needs to be complicated enough to serve as a real-life example of any collection that our processors may encounter in the next few months).  I made processing plans for six collections, all of which fulfilled our wish list.

On May 18, we started our training at the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt – Dietrich Library Center in an electronic classroom and we covered the basics of the project as well as what minimal processing means for the project, and how to process collections for this project.  In the afternoon we addressed the Archivists’ Toolkit.  We hope that the classroom day provides a sound foundation for what our processors will need to know when they start working in repositories.

So after spending a day talking ABOUT processing, we met on May 19 and 20 at the Independence Seaport Museum so that our processors could DO processing.  We started with the Marvin Rosefield Keck papers which we processed as a group.  This allowed our processors to really have a conversation about what was in the collection and how to move forward.  We followed the steps in our processing manual; we familiarized ourselves with the collection, we arranged the collection intellectually, we arranged the collection physically, and we talked about the description of the finding aid.

After we finished the Keck papers, we divided our processors into teams of two and gave each team another collection.  Becky Koch and Jennifer Duli worked on the Independence Seaport Museum Collection on the New York Shipbuilding Corporation;  Megan Good and Megan Atkinson worked on the Pollack collection of Ocean Liner ephemera; Jack McCarthy, an archival consultant, and Leslie Willis, the archivist for the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University worked on the George F. Sproule papers; Matt Herbison worked on the Ward collection of New York Shipbuilding Corporation records; and Courtney worked on the Red D Line records.

As soon as the physical processing was completed, our processors began working on entering the data into the Archivists’ Toolkit, gaining hands-on, real experience with the database.  When they were finished, they completed the worksheets we require at the end of the processing each collection.  As they finished their finding aids, Courtney and I tried to do quick proofs so that we could provide feedback.  All in all, we tried to make the training as similar to their future jobs as possible.

Were we successful?  Well, Courtney and I felt that the training went really well and was much more successful than our first attempts.  And, we processed six collections in a day and a half, so a good bit of work was accomplished.  I think we will know for sure once our student processors start working and we can see what we need to do differently next time.

Thanks very much to Matt Herbison for hosting the Spring 2010 training session!