While at the Academy of Natural Sciences, we processed the Academy’s President’s Office records. On this collection, we got to work for a week with our Project Archivist, Courtney, who is always a pleasure to have around.  It was especially nice to have additional assistance and her expertise on such a complicated and large collection. The collection comprised nine different accessions with little to no information regarding the transfers.  There were 140 linear feet of boxes (or 240 containers), most with several sets of overlapping dates and various numerical schemes written on the boxes. Which numbers meant something? Which numbers should we go by? Well, as it turned out, all of the numbers on the the boxes meant something! But the numbers weren’t enough.

Although the size of the collection was slightly daunting, it seemed logical at first that the creation years of the documents would most likely correspond to the President in office at that time.  Unfortunately, as we quickly discovered, not all of the materials were  created by the President or  his office. We realized that the provenance of the collection was not clear cut and that other materials were mixed in. Determining provenance was a little tricky at first as many of the employees shared a secretary or had secretaries that worked in a similar fashion.  After going through each box, analyzing who created the materials and then determining what that person did at the Academy, we were able to determine that 87 boxes or 43 linear feet of the collection were actually created by the Managing Director, not the President. We also learned that there was a Managing Director collection at the repository. When we took a look at the Managing Director records, we noticed that the two sets of materials filled in gaps and really did belong together. There was still 93 linear feet worth of materials to work with in the President’s Office records, spanning from 1874 to 2003, with a bulk of the materials created between 1939 and 1993.

The larger numbers on the boxes were simply numbering each box throughout the entire collection, but the boxes weren’t necessarily in a particular order. The dates written on the masking tape often indicated a set of materials that went together and the smaller written date range reflected the actual dates of the material within the boxes. Of course, provenance was the single most important factor in determining how this collection needed to be arranged and what materials belonged together.  After that, we were able to see what, if any, original order existed within each set of records. This collection was a prime example of why accessioning is so important. All and all, once the creator of each set of records became clear, the arrangement came together fairly well.

The next challenge was writing the historical note. The collection contained the papers of four Academy Presidents and one interim President, as well as the papers of several employees from various departments within the Academy, such as the treasurer, the comptroller, the director of eduction and others. What made writing a cohesive history so difficult was that the Presidents, whose papers are in the collection, did not always succeed one another, and the additional staff members, whose papers are in the collection, were not necessarily working with those Presidents.  At first I wrote a chronological history, including the names and terms of service of all the Academy’s Presidents, but only highlighting those represented in the collection.  Following Courtney’s suggestion to first discuss the history of the Presidents and follow with the additional staff, I realized that if I created a separate note within the finding aid listing each President and their term of service, I could tighten up the prose of the collection-level history, making it clearer and more specific.

These institutional records will be extremely useful to researchers interested in the history of the Academy of Natural Sciences, the activities of the Academy President and various projects undertaken during the dates of coverage.