Minimal Processing

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The decision to minimally process should be a collection-by-collection decision …

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Fairly early in this project, Courtney and I determined that “MPLP 2 Hours” was not going to be a wholesale success—most collections simply cannot be processed in that time frame, regardless of the shortcuts taken (our average across the board is 3.2 hours per linear foot). And in some cases, those shortcuts resulted in a product that we did not feel was more useful to a researcher post-processing. What we have determined is essentially this … it is difficult, if not impossible, to say that collections can be processed in a set or determined amount of time, but it is possible to make educated estimates allowing us to allocate human resources to process collections efficiently.

There are several factors that allow us to better determine a time frame for the processing of collections: age, type of collection, and original arrangement of the collection are the three biggies. None of these factors work independently—they are all intertwined to help determine the time frame. So, based upon the data collected for 125 collections, processors have physically processed collections with the oldest material dating from the:

17^th century at an average of 4.1 hours per linear foot;

18^th century at an average of 3.3 hours per linear foot;

19^th century at an average of 3.4 hours per linear foot;

20^th century at an average of 2.9 hours per linear foot.

Processors have processed:

artificial collections at an average of 3.6 hours per linear foot;

institutional/corporate records at an average of 2.5 hours per linear foot;

personal papers at an average of 3.7 hours per linear foot;

family papers at an average of 4.2 hours per linear foot.

Age seems like it should be the most logical factor, but in fact, it has proven to be the least certain factor in our ability to judge the time frame for processing. We thought originally that old collections (pre 1850s for certain) would take us significantly longer to process, but this is not necessarily the case. The age does not seem to deter us in being able to efficiently process an “old” collection. Age does, however, quite frequently deter us from describing the collections well. Quickly skimming for content in folders of 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century handwritten material is not easy—and it absolutely results in less thorough description. However, if the collection is arranged and available for research use, perhaps this is where we ask for help … as researchers use the collections, we can ask them to provide more robust description of what the correspondence, journals, etc. contain. Finding aids CAN be iterative … especially with technology such as the Archivists’ Toolkit. “Newer” collections may or may not be easier to process … certainly there is more typewritten material that makes it immediately easier to categorize series/subseries/folders and describe the contents of the folders more thoroughly. However, in the end, the ease of the processing relies more heavily on the type of collection more than the age.

For this project, we have divided collections into four basic types: institutional/corporate records, personal papers, family papers and artificial collections. Again, there is no one size fits all … each collection is unique (is that not why archival collections are so awesome?). Generally speaking though, an institution or company’s records can be processed most quickly, followed by personal papers and then family papers. Artificial collections are usually the fastest or the slowest depending entirely upon the collector. Usually, they are speedy—the collector is in love with the topic they are collecting and as a result, they arrange the collection for their own personal satisfaction and use—all the letters of a children’s book author are arranged chronologically by date sent or alphabetically by the recipients’ names. If this is the case, the artificial collection is a dream to process and it usually requires only description. In a few instances, however, we have found collections where the collector simply collects … they probably know that the stuff is important, but they are not organizers. At that point, trying to create a system out of a group of randomly acquired material can be quite difficult.

Institutional and business records are usually quick and easy and this is because the functions of a business or an institution generally follow the same basic structures and are fairly predictable. Usually, you will find financial records, minutes, committee records, administrative records, subject files, correspondence, etc. Because the function generates the records, it is logical and easy to determine a good organizational scheme for the papers. But as always, the collections are unique and we have found that different creators generate different levels of tidiness, logical order, and structure.

Personal papers are the next quickest to process (generally speaking), especially if the creator was involved in several major movements, careers, and/or activities. However, the ability to efficiently process a person’s personal collection often depends upon how intermingled those pursuits are with family, friends, and work.

Family papers have been, fairly consistently, the most time-consuming collections to process. The problems that arise with family papers that generally do not exist with personal papers are the intertwining relationships that make determining to whom a certain group of materials belong challenging, and sometimes, impossible. When every generation in a family has a woman named Sarah, determining generations becomes a trial. Many a day passed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania with the following conversation: “So wait, this is Sarah Logan Wister Starr?” “No, this is Sarah Logan Starr Blaine!” Or: “Here is a letter to Grandma Sarah from Sarah …does that mean it is Sarah Logan Starr Blain?” “No! It could be Sarah Logan Starr Blain OR Sarah Logan Wister Starr OR Sarah Tyler Boas Wister!” Egads … I wanted to buy a baby name book for this family! Not surprisingly, this kind of questioning takes time … lots of time.

The third main factor in determining time for processing a collection is existing arrangement. A collection of 20^th century business records thrown into boxes will take longer than a collection of 18^th century business records that are housed in volumes. A collection of family papers organized by the donor into distinct family member’s papers can probably be processed more quickly than a collection of personal papers that are completely unsorted. I have intentionally not used the term original order which implies that the order was generated the creator. Existing arrangement may have been generated by the creator, but in many cases, it is generated by an archivist who starts processing the collection but does not complete the project. Unfortunately, the hardest collections to process efficiently are often collections that someone else has started to process. Trying to understand an undocumented order that has been imposed or continue with an arrangement scheme that does not seem logical is much more difficult than imposing order from absolute chaos. And without a questions, the collections that take the absolute longest are ones in which parts of the collection have received item level treatment. Addressed in the next blog post will be how this type of existing arrangement affects description of collections.

So, basically what we have said here is that every collection is different and unique and there is absolutely no way to say that one time will work even within a date frame or a type of record. Our observations are backed by Greene and Meissner who say that “MPLP … advises vigorously against adopting cookie-cutter approaches … and [recommends] flexible approaches,” (page 176). In order to make educated estimates for allocating resources, we believe that a base-line starting time frame is needed: institutional/corporate collections should be given 3 hours per linear foot. Based upon the existing arrangement, tack on another hour per linear foot if it is in a shambles. If the bulk of the material is from the 18^th century, tack on yet another hour per linear foot for increased perusal time which will result in more effective description. So, in this case, your estimated processing time is 5 hours per linear foot. Could you do it in three? Yes, probably. However, with allowances for age and existing arrangement, you will almost unquestionably have a better product, still at just over ½ the rate of traditional processing.

Based upon our experience, the PACSCL/CLIR project believes that the following base-line processing time estimates would work well:

Artificial collections: 3 hours per linear foot

Institutional/corporate collections: 3 hours per linear foot

Personal papers: 4 hours per linear foot

Family papers: 6 hours per linear foot

Our averages clearly show how quickly collections can be processed … but the base-line estimate with upgrades allows us to provide the best possible product while being mindful of available resources.

Posted in All Posts, Lessons learned, Minimal Processing, Project Manager | No 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 »

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 »

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 »

More Product Less Process: Embracing flexibility in finding aids at Drexel University Archives

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

Written by Rob Sieczkiewicz, Archivist, Drexel University Archives

Drexel University Archives and Special Collections was one of the first repositories to participate in the PACSCL Hidden Collections project; processors came to Drexel in Fall 2009. As a result we have changed our procedures for publishing finding aids. In the spirit of the “More Product, Less Process,” our goal is to provide access to collections as quickly as possible, with minimal concern for pretty finding aids. We had been using Archivists’ Toolkit for almost 18 months before the PACSCL project processors arrived, and were enthusiasts. Before AT, creating and publishing finding aids was a laborious process, with not so pretty results. AT allowed us to export EAD easily, using a stylesheet created by the American Philosophical Society, slightly modified with Drexel information. After a few months, we decided we to revise the spreadsheet to match our website, which basically meant that one of our staff of two had to teach herself how to edit EXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL); this took a while, but the result was lovely. At the same time, inspired by the UMarmot catablog created by Rob Cox at UMass Amherst, we moved our collection descriptions to WordPress, relieving us of the chores of HTML editing was WordPress. The new platform and finding aid stylesheet looked great and worked just fine… until we needed to move away from WordPress and onto the same Content Management System (CMS) at the rest of the Drexel Libraries: Drupal. Moving to Drupal broke our stylesheet leaving us with a lovely-looking Drupal web site and unreadable finding aids. However, revising the style sheet to match that new site would have been a taken quite a bit of time. Asking whether such an effort would be worthwhile, we determined that if the default Archivists’ Toolkit stylesheet was good enough for the PACSCL project, it was good enough for us. Greene and Meissner say to invest your limited resources wisely – for us, the wisest investment was to put up the most basic finding aids, with minimal customization or adornment, and then process more collections, do more outreach, create more exhibitions rather than build the perfect XSL stylesheet.

We also upload finding aids to the PACSCL finding aids site. This process is slightly redundant, however, and requires a bit of HTML editing. Would it be a wiser use of resources to eliminate this redundancy? Why put finding aids in two places? We could simply link from the Drexel Archives web page to the PACSCL finding aids site. For some repositories, such as those who lack access to an institutional web page (or simply lack a web page), this is the only option. For others, giving up control of display is unthinkable. But for some repositories, like Drexel University Archives, it presents yet another option to consider in the quest to provide the most access to our patrons by making wisest use of our limited resources.

Posted in All Posts, Drexel University, Guest Blogger, Institutions, Minimal Processing, The Archivists' Toolkit | No Responses »

Presbyterian missionaries in Brazil

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

While prepping for processing at Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) back in March 2010, I remember feeling just a little jealous of the processors who would actually get to process all of the super cool collections there! So you can imagine how I jumped at the chance to process a collection at PHS when our processing schedule changed at the last minute. I could not wait to get my hands on some papers!

Taking on the Philip Sheeder Landes papers, I got to travel to mid-twentieth century Brazil and learn about Presbyterian mission work in an otherwise Catholic dominated mission environment. Landes was born in Brazil and spent most of his life there, and helped to build a Presbyterian community across the entire country — which is no small feat, in case you didn’t realize, Brazil is gigantic! In addition to evangelizing, the mission (there were actually 3 or 4 related Presbyterian missions strategically placed in Brazil) brought literacy and other education, including a farm school, to people throughout the remote areas of Brazil.

The Landes and other missionary papers we processed at PHS taught me a lot. For one thing, the missionaries we got to know truly embraced their adopted countries as their own, whether they were stationed in Brazil, China, Korea or the Belgian Congo. They devoted their whole lives to their work and chose to raise their families in these countries. Though there were undoubtedly negative consequences of missionary work and perhaps some ethnocentric motivation, I found that the missionaries we met were well-intentioned people, who provided very valuable services to the communities in which they lived.

While I was excited to process the Landes papers and learn more about Landes’ work in Brazil, I was frustrated to find out that approximately half of the collection is in Portuguese, a language that I am not familiar with! I didn’t get to learn as much about the Brazil mission as I would have liked, but I was surprised to see that even with the language barrier, I was able to quickly provide much needed order to a collection that was in complete disarray when I found it. Now it is ready for use, and I expect that a researcher, especially someone with knowledge of the Portuguese language, would certainly be satisfied with what it has to offer.

Posted in Minimal Processing, Presbyterian Historical Society | 2 Responses »

Former dancers (subject specialists) process the Pennsylvania Ballet records

Friday, July 1st, 2011

One of the first discussions my processing partner, Christiana, and I had was about our secret past as ballet dancers. This didn’t have much bearing on the first two collections we processed (the papers of the Safe Energy Communication Council and Health/PAC), but our third was the Pennsylvania Ballet records at Temple University Special Collections. Our knowledge of ballets, costumes, performances, and famous dancers would obviously have some effect on how we processed this collection, but we weren’t sure whether our subject knowledge would help or hinder our attempt to process at 2 hours per linear foot. This collection had a lot of photographic materials, and a not insignificant amount of those were unidentified or “miscellaneous.” Would we be so bogged down in trying to assign ballets to unidentified performance photographs that our processing speed suffered? Or would our knowledge of costumes and sets enable us to blithely sort miscellaneous photographs into piles of Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, Giselle, and so on?

Subject knowledge is a clear advantage when doing traditional processing. Knowing something about your collection before you start can save you research hours and make both arrangement and description easier. In the case of minimal processing, however, subject knowledge can only do so much good. There are some strict time limits on processing speed and everything must be considered in terms of trade offs: you can spend more time researching if you process a little quicker. If you leave those “general” or “miscellaneous” folders as they are, then you can do something more elaborate with the next series. Taking the time to utilize subject knowledge must be considered in the same way, which means there is a tipping point when doing so is no longer worth the time.

For example, in the Pennsylvania Ballet Collection there were times when we could have given titles or added description to previously untitled photographs and folders. We tried only to do this only when it would be quick and not break our stride. So if we looked through a folder of publicity photographs from, say, Sleeping Beauty, and found that unlabeled photographs from Giselle were included, it only took seconds to add the second ballet to the folder title. However, there were more situations in which we could have used our subject knowledge but chose not to, because we simply didn’t have the time. At the bottom of one box we found a thick layer of loose and unlabeled photographs of dancers, performances, and fundraising events. It would have been fairly easy to sort out all of the Nutcracker photographs. Or any photographs of a famous dancer. Or photographs we could date to a specific span of years when a certain dancer was in the company. But we couldn’t, because while this would have been easier for us than for processors without subject knowledge, it still would have taken an awful lot of time (which of course we didn’t have). So we decided to place these photographs in the dreaded “miscellaneous” folders and move on, doing the same with a box of loose slides. We also didn’t touch any chunky folders already labeled “miscellaneous,” “general,” or other vague terms that didn’t tell you much about content. (Folders with only one or two items in them, though? Those got re-titled.) If we had taken the time to identify every single one of those unlabeled items, then we would have had to skimp on arrangement and description elsewhere, which was not an option.

In the discussion of minimal processing using archivists with subject knowledge, it’s also worth discussing how much this can help researchers. In the above Sleeping Beauty and Giselle example, our addition would only help someone who was looking for photographs of Giselle productions by the Pennsylvania Ballet (so, probably not the vast majority of people who will access this collection). The place where subject knowledge was most needed was in the un-arranged jumble of photographs and slides, but these are also the parts the collection that would have taken the most time to deal with and were therefore unlikely to be touched during any minimal processing project.

To sum up, subject knowledge helps in traditional processing and certainly didn’t hurt us here; but it didn’t greatly improve the quality of the description and arrangement we were able to do, nor did it save us much time. Because we were practicing minimal processing, we didn’t have the luxury of using our subject knowledge to its full extent. Having knowledge about the material in your collection before you begin can help you, but the rewards are small given that you might not be able to apply it without devoting more time than you can spare.

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Posted in All Posts, Christiana Dobrzynski Grippe, Collection Processors, Institutions, Minimal Processing, Sarah Newhouse, Temple University Special Collections | No Responses »

THE (yes, THE) William Penn papers

Friday, June 24th, 2011

When our friend and co-processor Jenna heard that Michael and I were working on the Penn family papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, she was a little bit jealous. “That’s amazing!” she gushed. “But, you do realize, you have officially peaked in your careers as archivists. It doesn’t get any better than William Penn!”

Truly, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s collection of William Penn and family is unparalleled. It is a rich and vital source for anyone studying the history of the Pennsylvania colony, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), European-Native American cultural encounters, colonial administration, inter-colonial disagreements, the transition of colonial government at the time of the American Revolution, and myriad other topics. Michael and I were fascinated to find treaties upon which the Native American parties had drawn “pictograms” of their names next to the English equivalents. We were blown away by the sheer volume of records relating to the Maryland-Pennsylvania border dispute, which dragged on for many decades. I’m a bit of a Quaker history nerd, so I was thrilled to see Penn’s correspondence with George Fox. All of which is to say that from the perspective of a researcher, Jenna is right: it doesn’t get any better than the Penn family papers.

From the perspective of an archivist, however, I have to say: I hope that wasn’t the peak of my career. The Penn family papers were frustrating to process precisely because they are such an important and frequently-used collection. As an archives student I’m often told that archival processing and description are iterative processes, and this collection really brought that truth home. Almost two centuries have passed since the Historical Society was founded, and the Penn papers seemingly represent a cross-section of every fad, trend, and development in archival theory. There are huge bound volumes of collected documents, custom-size boxes for individual items, and several generations of Hollinger boxes; they are described in volume indexes, outdated finding aids, and a card catalog; important documents have been hand-copied, microfilmed, and photocopied. The collection is all over the place.

Under the auspices of this minimal-processing project, we didn’t have the time to update everything according to today’s standards and best practices. But even if we could, it might not even be desirable. Decades of scholars have used the collection as it is and cited their sources accordingly. While working on this collection, Michael and I had to ensure that nothing we did would inhibit the ability of researchers to find materials they used last week, or chase scholarly citations from 100 years ago. What processing we did was necessarily minimal, but our major objective was to create an online finding aid that would serve as an entry point to the collection. That much we accomplished, and we are pleased to make this contribution to the field. Welcome to the digital world, William Penn!

What have we learned from the experience?

Here are our words of wisdom to researchers: Come to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania! The Penn family papers are an incredible resource. We recommend you consult the card catalog on site to ensure you will have a fruitful experience.

Here are our words of wisdom to archivists: Come to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania! Maybe ask if you can get your hands dirty on an unprocessed collection instead of the Penn family papers. If you do work with the Penn family papers, allow at least 150 years to do a thorough job. At which point archival theory may have changed sufficiently that it will be time to start all over again….but you can worry about that when you get there.

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Chaos to Order, in 4 hours or less

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

Written by Celia Caust-Ellenbogen and Michael Gubicza.

When we first saw the boxes holding the Belfield papers, stacked on shelves in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, we said to each other: “Ohhh boy, I bet there’s good stuff in there!” That was our Pavlovian response: the collection was stored entirely in candy-bar and liquor boxes.

Our next response was anxiety about our 2-hour-per-linear-foot target processing speed: the collection was stored entirely in candy-bar and liquor boxes. Were these boxes packed by a child or a drunkard?

We’re still not sure who packed the boxes, but they were truly a mess. Sometimes documents were folded up and tied together in little packets, but more often the materials were just loose. The Belfield papers seemed insurmountable. But we’re proud to say that we managed to process them more or less on time. With help from Holly and Courtney we finished before our 6-week deadline was up, although if you count man-hours we clocked somewhere around 3.7 hours per linear foot. That’s not bad—it’s almost twice our target speed (2 hours per linear foot) and a bit above the project average (2.8 hours per linear foot), but it’s just under the speed Greene and Meissner suggest for minimal processing (4 hours per linear foot, and that’s for large 20^th century collections of business records). It is well under the speed of traditional processing, which can take up to 40 hours per linear foot!

Most importantly, we are pleased with the finding aid we produced. We didn’t quite manage folder-level description, but we did at least provide subseries-level description. And now that everything is arranged in folders and document boxes, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania can finally grant physical access to the materials.

As much as we dreaded having to paw through the disorganized boxes of the Belfield papers, in retrospect we’re almost glad they were such a mess at the beginning. It forced us to do lots of research and explore related subject material in order to understand the collection well enough to arrange it properly. Don’t get me wrong, this was still minimal processing. We didn’t spend weeks checking books out of the library. But whenever we needed some additional context, we did hop on the computer for a quick Google search or visit to Ancesty.com. Over the course of 6 weeks of processing, we covered a lot of interesting topics. Lucky for us, the Fisher-Wister-Starr-Blain families happened to be involved in some fascinating things. We learned about Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, Colonial Dames of America, the Sesquicentennial Exposition, stamp collecting, world travel during the Great Depression, twentieth century psychiatry, and nineteenth-century industry and legal practice, just for starters. The Belfield papers will prove to be an amazing resource for researchers in these, and many more subject areas, and we are proud to say that we were able to make the collection serviceable for them—in less than 4 hours per linear foot!