A month ago, Becky Koch and I finished our first “official” minimal processing project at the College of Physicians.  The records, The College of Physicians Office of the Executive Director, amounted to 112 boxes.  Overall, it was a good selection for minimal processing, with the exception of restricted materials.  This being said, there was one thing I learned about minimal processing that seems to illustrate how it should and should not be done.

The issue is the difficulty of processing with a partner while trying to get a job done as quickly as possible.  Our method was to divide the work and conquer it equally and quickly.  This was not a good method because we were not coordinated with one another on what particular name a folder should be labeled or the type of series it should be placed under.  Do we call it financial, administrative, programs…etc.  Our vocabulary and thoughts on the overall collection and arrangement were not synonymous (how could it be) and without it, both of us thought of our own individual ideas and labels.  This is also problematic later on in the collection because as the records are processed, there are usually some preliminary ideas which do not always end up in the final product.  This led to a very large amount of rearranging and re-titling when we finally put the collection together intellectually.  This problem led me to realize that if an archivist is processing with a partner, almost all folder ideas, series ideas, and titles need to be discussed thoroughly while processing so that the two archivists are not processing one collection using two different organizational and title schemes.

Fortunately for both of us, the following records we processed, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod records at the Lutheran Theological Seminary were processed with much more discussion over what each of us thought were parts of the organization and we discussed titles in detail.  This made the processing and organizing less complicated and created more fluent folder and series titles.