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Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories

Monday, May 7th, 2012

If you’ve been following this blog of the PACSCL-CLIR Hidden Collections Processing Project, you might be interested in learning about the Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories (HCI-PSAR, or the “Small Repository Project” for short). This post could be filed under “PACSCL-CLIR Student Processors–Where Are They Now?” since I, and fellow former student processor Michael Gubicza, are both currently employed on the Small Repository Project. But before you conjure up too many thoughts of drug-addicted 80s TV stars and one-hit-wonder 90s teen queens, think of this post also under the headings “Lessons Learned” and “Project Legacy.” The Small Repository Project carries on PACSCL’s commitment to uncovering hidden archival collections, and builds on the PACSCL-CLIR methodology, tools, and infrastructure–with a few new twists, of course.

Another creative storage solution at Millbrook Society! Hatboro Borough records, stored in a biscuit box.

First, some background on the Small Repository Project. It’s an initiative of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania–not coincidentally, one of the repositories where I processed for PACSCL-CLIR–with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Small Repository Project aims to make better known and more accessible the important archival collections held at the many small, primarily volunteer-run historical societies, historic sites, and museums in the Philadelphia region. It was envisioned as a three-part project, and right now we’re in the midst of Phase I, which focuses on Philadelphia and Montgomery Counties. My title is Project Surveyor, so my job is to visit all of the small repositories in those two counties and survey their archival collections. There are two major components to the survey work: description and assessment.

Historical Society of Tacony: Frank Shuman, a Tacony resident, developed the world's first solar power plant in 1912-1913!

Description In just six months of surveying, we’ve already discovered many amazing collections! From big names–like Pennsylvania Governor Samuel Pennypacker and Civil War naval engineer John Ericsson–to names that didn’t make the history books–like Frank Shuman, who built the world’s first solar power plant in 1912, or Dr. Hiram Corson, an abolitionist and prominent advocate for women physicians. To make these important resources more visible, we are creating what amount to “stub” finding aids: we don’t have the time to physically process any collections, but we can provide collection-level descriptions with very summary information. To be as fast yet thorough as possible, Michael and I use Archivist’s Toolkit, Holly and Courtney’s data-entry best practices, and an Excel-to-XML worksheet of my own devising that was heavily inspired by Matt Herbison’s.

PACSCL and the University of Pennsylvania recently agreed to host our finding aids, so they will be on the PACSCL Finding Aid Site together with the PACSCL-CLIR “Hidden Collections” finding aids. I am personally thrilled about this detail, because it means Philadelphia will be one step closer to having one central database where all area archival collections could be searched. In one place, you will be able to search collections from the biggest professionally-run PACSCL member to the smallest all-volunteer historical society! None of the Small Repository Project finding aids are up quite yet, but keep an eye on the site…

Old York Road Historical Society

Assessment As I mentioned, the Hidden Collections Project doesn’t have the time to physically process all the collections that we survey, but we do hope that at least some of them will be processed in the not-too-distant future! Toward that end, we not only describe but also assess each of the collections we survey. We look at the condition of the material, quality of housing, degree of intellectual access (existence of finding aids), physical accessibility (organization), and research value (a combination of an interest ranking, and a rating for how well those interesting topics are documented). These ratings help establish collection care and processing priorities–a collection with a high research value rating but low accessibility ratings should be processed first.

PACSCL did the same sort of assessments for its member institutions a few years back (PACSCL Consortial Survey Initiative), based on a survey project at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania before that. The collections processed for the PACSCL-CLIR “Hidden Collections” Processing Project were those identified by the PACSCL survey as having the highest potential research value.

The assessment methodology that we use in the Small Repository Project, down to the assessment criteria and ratings descriptions, is modeled after the PACSCL survey. Check out Matthew Lyons’ blog post about our methodology. We strive for consistency so that our ratings will be comparable to PACSCL’s. Only the future can say whether anyone will undertake a large-scale, multi-repository processing project like PACSCL-CLIR “Hidden Collections.” But our assessments can help individual small repositories best allocate their own limited resources.

Social Media While I worked on the PACSCL-CLIR project, I loved sharing my favorite “finds” from the collections I processed on the project Flickr page and blog. We do the same thing at the Small Repository Project! Check out our blog and our photoalbums. For updates, follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Finally, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Holly, Courtney, and everyone who has worked on the PACSCL-CLIR Hidden Collections Project. The tools, techniques, and wisdom they developed and shared on their project website have proved invaluable to us in implementing the Small Repository Project. I’m sure that many other important and innovative archival projects will build on the PACSCL-CLIR project, and we all, collectively, thank you for enriching our communal knowledge.

Posted in All Posts, Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Institutions, Lessons learned | 6 Responses »

Excel to EAD-XML to AT—the spreadsheet from heaven.

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Although it seems like a million years, it actually was not so long ago that our students were processing at the Independence Seaport Museum. While we were there, we were faced with one of the limitations of our minimal processing time frames. The archivist there, Matt Herbison (now at Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center) had a few spreadsheets detailing information on ships’ plans—information that made the collections truly useful to researchers. Problem was, there were thousands of entries in the spreadsheets and we knew that our processors could never re-key or copy/paste that information into the Archivists’ Toolkit in the time allotted for the processing.

Because we knew that this information would really make a difference for users, we thought and thought of ways to make this work, but our best solution involved saving the spreadsheet as a pdf and linking to it from the finding aid–not very elegant. And then Matt, who really is extraordinarily techie, created this amazing spreadsheet that solved the problem. To sweeten the deal even more, he offered Courtney and me the use of the spreadsheet for the project.

I will now make a very bold statement: this spreadsheet made it possible for us to finish the project within the time frame. Not only did we use it at the Seaport, our processors used it for original data entry at repositories that had spotty internet connections, technical troubles, and/or did not adopt the Archivists’ Toolkit. Our Archivists’ Toolkit cataloger used it as a starting point for almost all electronic legacy finding aids.

Matt has offered to share this spreadsheet with everyone. It is available here and we have created a guide for using the spreadsheet. In a nutshell, each column in the spreadsheet maps to specific field in the Archivists’ Toolkit. It has three levels of hierarchy below the collection level, so it not the tool of choice if your finding aids has sub-sub series and items, but for most modern finding aids, it is the ticket. I should say, though, that it is not necessarily a quick process if you are starting with existing data … time needs to be taken to combine columns, format data, and check for errors. If you know how to use regular expressions, you can really streamline some of this work. If you are doing original data entry, the use of the spreadsheet is incredibly efficient for getting container lists into the Archivists’ Toolkit.

This means that anyone with knowledge of MS Excel can create finding aids and take legacy information from an electronic format to xml. Pretty awesome! I will say that a little knowledge of EAD is very useful and understanding the Archivists’ Toolkit will make decisions in data entry easier. Many of our students preferred working with the spreadsheet rather than the Archivists’ Toolkit, but it is a matter of preference. I think it is a little harder to see the hierarchy when using the spreadsheet, but it is a thousand times easier fix error in Excel than in the Archivists’ Toolkit. Check it out, try it out and see if it changes your life.

Yes, I did say that … I think it could change your life!

Thanks SO much to Matt Herbison!

Posted in All Posts, Drexel University College of Medicine, Independence Seaport Museum, Institutions, Legacy Finding Aids, Minimal Processing, Project Manager, The Archivists' Toolkit | 4 Responses »

MPLP is good for your health!

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

During the summer, Holly and I tackled the Marketing and Public Relations Department records at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives. This was a great collection for MPLP and, if I heard Holly correctly, we processed the collection in under 2 hours per linear foot!

According to Susie Anderson, the Museum’s archivist, this collection gets a lot of use, especially internally. Before processing, the collection was difficult to use because it was accessioned in so many chunks over time that information on particular subjects, artists or exhibits were literally in dozens of boxes. With no proper finding aid there was no way for Susie to know where everything was, and pulling all those record cartons off the shelf for every reference request was kind-of a drag too.

To get the job done, Holly and I commingled several alphabetically arranged subject files into one system, relabeled files and created our finding aid. Now, for the most part (I’ll admit, we were not able to collocate everything), files on particular topics, people or events are arranged together and there is a folder level finding aid. With any luck, Susie will only have to look in one or two record cartons to find what she needs and be satisfied that she has found it all!

After processing this collection I can verify that pulling over-stuffed record cartons on and off the shelf all day long hurts! I don’t mean to sound like a total wimp (OK, I know, I sound like a wimp), but I feel for my fellow archivists who deal with packed record cartons on a daily basis and wonder, is that good for you physical health? Well, maybe it isn’t bad for your health per se, but lifting those cartons on and off shelves over and over again certainly increases your chance of on-the-job injury. At least now, thanks to minimal processing, researchers at the Art Museum can conduct more targeted searches in the Marketing and Public Relations Department records, and that means less heavy lifting for Susie.

In case you are wondering what’s in the Marketing and Public Relations department records, I can tell you, there are lots of interesting things. There’s information on the Museum’s marketing strategies for special exhibitions and documentation of outreach efforts and events going back to the 1960s. The collection is loaded with photographs (making boxes all the more heavy) of featured works of art and Museum events. Snapshots taken during exhibit openings and other events were especially fun, offering lots of evidence of 1980s fashions in particular.

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Posted in All Posts, Minimal Processing, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Project Archivist | No Responses »

Kids say the darndest things

Friday, October 28th, 2011

A while back I attended a lecture by our fearless leader, the Collector in Chief, Archivist of the United States David Ferriero. Ferriero told an amusing anecdote about his first meeting with the head archivists of all the Presidential libraries. Unbeknownst to Ferriero, the Presidential archivists prepared for the meeting by digging through their collections for traces of the newly-appointed AOTUS—that day, Ferriero was surprised and delighted to be presented with facsimiles of three letters he had written as a youth to his idols, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. You can view these fan letters from an adoring schoolboy on Flickr .

Now, that’s a cute story. But if you asked me to rate the adorableness of kids’ letters in the archives on a scale of 1 to 10, I might give Ferriero a 4. For some seriously sweet correspondence, head over to Temple and ask to see the South Street Dance Company records. On a scale of 1 to 10, Marcus here gets a 12: this letter to the South Street Dance Co. is cavity-inducing.

Why is this letter in the archives? Ellen Forman, the founder of South Street Dance Company, was more than just a talented dancer and innovative choreographer: she was committed to using dance as an outreach tool. She developed dance-centric community programs for children as well as the elderly, encouraging inter-generational participation in the arts and community-building. The collection, therefore, is a fantastic resource not only for choreographers and dance historians, but also for anyone interested in creative community engagement programs. Because of the stacks of thank-you letters for kids who enjoyed her programs, this would probably also be a useful collection for someone attempting to come up with a systematic classification system for rating adorable-ness of children’s letters, but we’ll call that a secondary research value…

Unfortunately, the PACSCL-CLIR “Hidden Collections” project is drawing to a close, and the South Street Dance Company records was the last collection that Michael and I had the opportunity to process. I’m happy to say that it left a sweet taste in our mouths. Our sincerest thanks go out to the repositories that hosted us over the past eight months—the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the National Archives and Records Administration (Mid-Atlantic Region), and Temple University. We would also like to thank YOU, dear reader, for your interest in the project and attention to our blog. Thank you for sharing this wonderful experience with us!

What was my favorite part of working on the “Hidden Collections” project? Well, I think Marcus said it best: “I liked when I danced on stage.”

Posted in All Posts, Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, Collection Processors, Institutions, Temple University Special Collections | No Responses »

M’Carty and Davis: 19th century booksellers

Friday, October 21st, 2011

Have you ever wondered how books were sold in the nineteenth century, long before the advent of Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com? Probably not. I certainly hadn’t—at least not until my processing partner Dan and I started working on the M’Carty and Davis collection at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.

As we learned while processing this collection, nineteenth-century book selling didn’t just happen in the context of a traditional, brick-and-mortar store—at least at M’Carty and Davis, a Philadelphia book-selling and -publishing firm launched by William McCarty and Thomas Davis in 1816. Although it maintained a shop in the City of Brotherly Love, M’Carty and Davis made much of its money through the endeavors of a corps of traveling salesmen who peddled company wares across western Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia.

According to historian Rosalind Remer, author of Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic , M’Carty and Davis’ business model differed from that of other booksellers in early nineteenth century America. Their salesmen traveled widely, sold books on the spot, hooked subscribers for future publications, and exchanged inventory with other area sellers. These activities, along with the distribution of mail-order catalogs, linked urban M’Carty and Davis with rural Americans eager for reading material.

The sales journals of M’Carty and Davis’ salesmen are part of the collection now open for research at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.

Posted in All Posts, Collection Processors, Devin Manzullo-Thomas, Institutions, Rosenbach Museum and Library | No Responses »

Item Level Processing – For Realz?

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

Christiana and I recently had the great pleasure of processing the Julien Levy Gallery records at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This collection is so rad, we just can’t stop talking about it. Levy, a New York art gallery owner, introduced Surrealism to America in the 1930s and 40s. As a result, his papers are riddled with letters from Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, and many more artists and philosophers of the Surrealist movement.

Now, I know you’re thinking – Jenna. Why are you blogging about processing styles when we could talk about the goings-on of drunken Surrealists? Answer: Because I’m still suffering from trauma induced by item-level processing, and I need to talk it out.

The Levy papers came to us with a certain level of previous processing. It’s actually a very impressive story – a secretary for the Levy family, with no previous archival experience, arranged Julien’s papers and created some really thorough, kick-ass excel spreadsheets in lieu of a finding aid. Our job was to re-folder the collection and reorganize the files into a new series list, then import the excel spreadsheets into Archivist Toolkit. Easy, right? WRONG.

Our challenge (or really, Holly and Courtney’s challenge) was thus: how do you take a well-described collection and then un-describe it through minimal processing? Why would you even do that? And what sort of finding aid would we be able to finagle for this truly awesome collection?

While the bosses pondered the tough questions, Christiana and I tackled the excel spreadsheets. We knew that the collection was very well described, and our goal was simply to make the folder titles as uniform and streamlined as possible. But unbeknownst to us, editing the excel spreadsheet would prove to me an emotional journey the likes of which we may never experience again.

From the very beginning, we came across folder titles like this:

Schawinsky, Xanti: To Julien Levy listing income and expenses with reference to the Bourjois drawings, congratulating Julien and Jean’s marriage, foreword to exhibition catalog written by Alexander Dorner, biographical information, greeting cards with photos by Schawinsky, exhibition catalog from Galleria la Colonna in Firenze;

And our personal favorite:

Antheil, George: To Julien and Jean, How are things in New York City?

Can you see what I mean about an emotional journey? First we laughed, then we panicked, and eventually, we just cried. We sat there for weeks, computer drones side-by-side, mouths slack as we inserted a colon here and a comma there. And then one day, Christiana said the thing that would change my life FOREVER.

“Well,” she said, sighing over a particularly long folder title. “That’s item level description for ya.”

My head whipped around. “What?”

She regarded me strangely. “Item-level processing? Here,” she turned back to the computer and typed in a few search words. When she found what she was looking for, she tilted the computer screen to face me. “Here’s the finding aid for a collection I item-level processed a few years ago. Took me forever.”

I stared with increasing horror at the folder titles describing, in minute detail, the topics covered in correspondence, who sent their regards to whom, and exactly how many pages of diaries contained writing. Now, I’m not a complete dummy. I know what item level processing is, at least in theory. But I’ve really only ever done minimal processing. Is THIS why every repository in the world has a backlog? Is this why time seems to slow down as soon as you hit the archives doors?

I’ve never had an opinion in the minimal vs. item level processing debate until now. As someone who comes from a history background, I usually approach archives from a researcher/use perspective. And I can still say that, in my opinion, item level processing is totally unnecessary. If someone can glean enough information from a finding aid to write a freaking book, then it shouldn’t be happening.

I sound like I’ve gone rogue, but seriously. It’s okay to let the researcher do a little work. More often than not, researchers really enjoy the discovery process. If we have the time or resources to do some extra collection description, then of course we should (maximal processing, anyone?) But until then, I think we should focus on getting the collections ready for use as quickly and efficiently as possible.

As for Christiana and I, we may be seeing excel spreadsheets in our dreams for many months to come.

Posted in All Posts, Institutions, Jenna Marrone, Minimal Processing, Philadelphia Museum of Art | No Responses »

Temple University: Haven for Pinko-Commies and Itinerant Archivists

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

The academy is stereotypically seen as a haven for “pinko-commies” and other subversive intellectuals, so it seems fitting that the first collection Michael and I processed at Temple University was the records of the Socialist Review. Published from 1970-2006 under the various titles Socialist Revolution, Socialist Review, and Radical Society, this lefty periodical was an important forum for socialist discourses at the end of the twentieth century. SR, as it is often abbreviated, was not narrowly focused on socialism, however: its pages were filled with articles on American politics, labor, feminism, racial and sexual minorities, international relations and development, technology and the environment, and cultural and social theory. I even found a submission entitled “Latke vs. Hamentash: A Feminist Critique”!

Michael and I have had the opportunity to process some incredible collections during this project, but the Socialist Review collection is one of my favorites. It is a fantastic resource for anyone studying the intellectual history of late 20^th century American socialist ideology, or any number of new social movements (feminism, worker’s rights, environmentalism, etc.). Many prominent intellectuals were involved with the journal; I found myself star-struck when I stumbled across correspondence with some of my idols, including Noam Chomsky and Barbara Ehrenreich. There is also a lot of material in the collection that is just plain fun, because the editorial board had a sense of humor and joked around a lot. My absolute favorite item is a mock form letter for rejected submissions. Editors could simply check off the reason for rejecting a manuscript: “Stalinist / Workerist / Papist / Foolish,” or provide a more detailed critique: “Your succinct analysis and breezy style make this piece too accessible for readers of Socialist Review. Also you should be aware that a piece as relevant and contemporary as this is—in a word—too current for SR. With a lag time of 10-14 months…We’re primarily interested in material with strong library value—they’re our most important subscribers you know.”

Ever-selfless, we archivists usually say that we do minimal processing for the benefit of researchers, so that they can have access to more collections with less wait time. Of course that’s our primary motivation, but since starting on the Socialist Review collection, I recognize how I, as a processing archivist, am also benefiting from MPLP. The National Archives was supposed to be Michael’s and my last stop on our grand PACSCL-CLIR tour. However, through our efficient use of minimal processing practices, we were able finish ahead of schedule. That meant we had enough time to move on to Temple University, where the Socialist Review papers turned out to be one of my favorite collections. MPLP benefits processing archivists because it allows us to work on more different collections, and that means the opportunity to discover even more important, interesting, humorous, and beautiful materials hidden in the archives!

Stay tuned, because with two weeks left in the project, Michael and I are lucky to have one more collection waiting for us at Temple University…

Posted in All Posts, Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, Collection Processors, Institutions, Minimal Processing, Temple University Special Collections | No Responses »

“Meeting” Celebrities

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

One thing I have enjoyed most about working for the Hidden Collections Project is the opportunity it has given me to meet famous historical figures. Of course when I say “meet” I mean it in the loosest sense of the word. I think that many people who have been in an archive would agree that when you work with a collection you often feel like you are “meeting” the individuals who created the materials in that collection. I think that this is not only true for a collection’s primary creators who you may get to know very well through their numerous diaries, correspondence and photographs. I think that this is also true for minor creators who may have only contributed a single letter to a collection.

During my time working for the project, I was amazed by how often I came across such letters that also had been written by famous figures. One collection in particular—the Rufus King family papers—truly made me feel like I was rubbing elbows with celebrities. The collection, which is housed at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, is largely comprised of materials that were created by Rufus King and his sons. These men occupied a central position in the political life of the early United States and the collection contains several letters written by figures straight out of a high school history textbook including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, John Jacob Astor, Dorthea Dix and Zachary Taylor.

Each time I came across one of these letters I felt as though I was being introduced to a celebrity without getting the opportunity to learn more about them. I found in the Rufus King family papers one letter written by each of the figures listed above without other materials that could have enriched the context of those letters. If I were to expand the metaphor of “meeting” historical figures, it was like attending a cocktail party where the King family quickly introduced me to some of their famous friends and allowed me to engage in some small talk with them before politely ushering me away to another group of friends.

Looking back on the short time I spent processing the Rufus King family papers I am grateful for the opportunity it gave me to handle documents written by famous historical figures, but I am more grateful for the lessons it taught me about archival collections. For example, the King family papers reminded me that fame and significance can be very subjective terms. When I came across letters written by “famous” historical figures, I expected that everyone around me would be as excited about my find as I was. However, after sharing these discoveries my excitement was sometimes met with a quizzical look and the question, “Who is that?” That response reminded me of a lesson I had learned in past history and archival courses—there are no universal standards for judging an individual’s historical significance or determining the value of a collection.

The experience also reminded me that it is a good thing that such standards do not exist. Although it was exciting to handle letters written by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the like, I discovered that many of these letters were quite brief and offered few insights. In fact, some of the more insightful letters in the collection seemed to have been written by less well-known figures. So, while some will likely value the Rufus King family papers because of the opportunities it gives them to “meet” historical celebrities, others will likely value it for a host of other anticipated and unanticipated reasons.

Posted in All Posts, Collection Processors, Dan Cavanaugh, Institutions, Rosenbach Museum and Library | No Responses »

Stella!

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Dr. Stella Kramrisch, the curator of the Indian Art Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1954 until her death in 1993, exerted a deep and lasting influence on the field of Indian Art scholarship and collecting. For those who are unfamiliar with her life and work, her obituary from the New York Times offers an overview of her life and accomplishments (and, of course, our finding aid includes a fabulous biographic note). She was a force to be reckoned with in the art museum world, a cat lover, and a one-time hyena owner. If you are ever in the PMA’s Indian and Himalayan Art galleries, take a moment to check the provenance of the objects on display. About 2/3 of them were either acquired by Stella Kramrisch while she was curator, bought with funds in her name, or were part of her personal collection, bequeathed to the museum after her death. Clearly, the PMA would not be the institution it is today without her.

Processing her papers presented unique challenges for an MPLP-based processing style:

It had previously gone through the hands of at least two people: an intern in the PMA’s Indian and Himalayan Art Department who had subject knowledge of Indian art and scholarship, and a project archivist at the PMA.
The materials dealt with by these two people were separated in to two distinct chunks (located on opposite sides of the processing room, even).
The project archivist and the intern described and arranged these parts of the collection to different degrees. The intern did not have archival training, but had enough subject area knowledge to write out very detailed folder titles (which were both helpful and problematic for MPLP!) and identify photographs. There was, however, no folder-level arrangement. The project archivist wrote an excellent inventory and arrangement suggestions, and labeled some of the sections of records with paper inserted into the record cartons. She left all materials in their original order, as they were when they were transferred from the Indian and Himalayan Art Department.
Due to the importance of Dr. Kramrisch to scholars from various fields, this collection had been accessed many times between its transference to the archives (piecemeal starting in the mid-1990’s) and our processing. Biographers had pulled materials from their original folders and relocated those documents into new folders to better suit their research and writing needs. And those are the alterations we know about.

My processing partner, Christiana, and I were a little apprehensive before we waded in, expecting that reconciling the contrasting arrangements of two chunks of Stella’s papers would be time consuming and frustrating. We feared that the existing organization created by the intern wouldn’t work for the collection as a whole, and that we would need to pull the contents of those boxes apart while doing some serious interfiling and hefting of record cartons. We found, however, that we could largely keep those series and that the materials from the Indian and Himalayan Art Department would either fit into those or could be put into new (small-ish) series of their own.

We did, however, keep these groupings of materials in separate subseries. For example, there were materials processed by the intern and art department materials that fit into a “Writings and research notes” series. But rather than interfile these records, we put them in two subseries to preserve the distinction between the kinds of processing they received. We thus saved ourselves an awful lot of time that would have been spent interfiling and (I think) made it clearer to researchers how much the materials two subseries had been interfered with, thus making it easier for them to know what to expect when they open a folder.

For me the most challenging aspect of this collection was dealing with folder titles written by someone with lots of subject knowledge, but no archival training. It was time consuming to reword someone else’s titles – which he had put hours of research into – and wrangle them into something that could be alphabetized in a subject file subseries. Titles like “Manuscripts and correspondence on a book on death that SK and Anindita Balsev were going to co-author” or (my favorite) “POPULAR WISDOM !?!” might contain useful information, but aren’t in a format that’s useful to archivists.

But the challenges combined with the opportunity to learn more about Stella Kramrisch made this collection incredibly rewarding to work with. The collection actually seems very similar to Stella herself: full of information, very valuable and obviously loved, but at times difficult to work with.

Posted in All Posts, Collection Processors, Institutions, Minimal Processing, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sarah Newhouse | No Responses »

Steamy Records at the National Archives

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Some might assume that the collection of records relating to the Army Corps of Engineers’ public works projects, located at the National Archives at Philadelphia, would be boring. But based on the number of boiler room reports we found in this collection, I’d have to say it’s pretty steamy.

I was excited when my coprocessor Michael and I found out we would be working at the National Archives (NARA), because it was an opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of our government’s records program. I was also looking forward to getting to know one of NARA’s first-class collections, so I was pleased to learn we would be processing “General correspondence relating to Civil Works projects originating under the Wilmington and Philadelphia Engineers.” The title isn’t pithy, but the collection is an important one. The Army Corps of Engineers has been under increased scrutiny in recent years because of some major controversies, notably the failure of New Orleans’s Army-designed levees during Hurricane Katrina. The records we processed at NARA provide context for current debates, documenting the failures and successes of the agency in the Philadelphia area during the first half of the 20^th century. Major projects at the Schuylkill River, the Delaware River, and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, as well as numerous smaller projects, are well-represented in this collection. In addition to correspondence, bids, memoranda—and yes, boiler room reports—the collection is richly illustrated with photographs, blueprints, and maps.

Like everyone else, the National Archives is engaged in a constant battle against processing backlog. So, I’m pleased that Michael and I were able help them out by whipping through our collection in record time: just about 1.1 hours per linear foot! That’s less than 1/2 the average processing time for this project (2.8 hours per linear foot), and much faster than traditional processing techniques. We were able to move so quickly because, unlike some unruly family papers we’ve dealt with before (ahem, Belfield), the Army Corps of Engineers’ records were arranged with military precision. Not wanting to argue with the War Department’s filing system, we kept the existing order and focused on physical rehousing and writing an excellent finding aid.

Soon our finding aid will be posted to the PACSCL Finding Aids site, where researchers can peruse it along with finding aids from other member institutions. We encourage the maritime historians and “bridge nerds” who might already be on the PACSCL site viewing Independence Seaport Museum’s finding aids to also check out this collection. We think they’ll love the blueprints and specifications for bridges and dredging equipment. Marine ecologists already on the PACSCL site to see Academy of Natural Sciences finding aids might also enjoy this collection, which describes in detail changes that the Army Corps of Engineers enacted on nearby waterways. And of course, we hope that YOU, dear reader, will check out the Civil Works projects finding aid before browsing the other incredible finding aids on the PACSCL Finding Aids site.