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Keeping the minimal processing dialog going: The views of a student processor

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

(In response to: Keeping the Minimal Processing Dialog going, by Courtney Smerz and Reflections on Training and the PACSCL/CLIR Project, by Jack McCarthy, CA, Archival Consultant.)

Mr. McCarthy’s concern over dealing with separated materials within the “More Product, Less Process” methodology is certainly valid. When faced with a folder containing seemingly unrelated or miscellaneous material, it is extremely difficult to know which course of action is appropriate. As a processor in these situations, you must ask yourself “should these items be separated or maintained,” and as importantly, “how will slowing my pace here impact how I treat the rest of the collection?”

The best approach to take really depends on the situation. For example one of our first collections, the Douglas and Dorothy Steere papers, included a box that has attained special status within our project; the “box of despair.” Inside the box was a mound of loose papers, with no apparent order.

Holly recommended that as a team we separate the materials within this box, grouping the material by general categories such as correspondence, notes, photographs, etc. From there we were able to integrate that material into pre-existing series as we further processed the collection. This approach was necessary for the “box of despair” because if the box was left in its current state, it would never have been accessible to researchers. Additionally, original order in the Steere collection had been compromised throughout the years as a result of so many processors working on small parts of the collection. Therefore, in order to complete processing, we had to integrate boxes of separated material based on what we thought made appropriate intellectual sense. As a team we continued to use this approach when faced with similarly daunting piles of disorganized materials.

In other instances, we have been advised by Holly and Courtney not to separate material from folders if it appears that original order would suffer as a result. Instead, they have recommended that we keep the folder in its current state and make a correlating “scope and content” note in the finding aid. In a recent collection, The Thornton Oakley collection of Howard Pyle and his Students, this approach was implemented. In one folder there were several magazine clippings that could have potentially been separated individually and placed elsewhere in the series. Yet because original order had been maintained throughout most of the collection, we decided to leave the folder in its current state and label it “Assorted Tearsheets collected by Thornton Oakley 1887-1911.” Within the finding aid we added a note stating, “this box contains tear sheets from Scribner’s, Harper’s, and The Literary Digest.” This maintains original order, while at the same time highlighting content that a researcher may find valuable.

The situational approach is our best hope for reconciling the dilemma of separated materials. While it is difficult to ensure that every decision we make is correct, over time we are improving the methods used deal with “grey area” issues such as this one.

Posted in All Posts, Forrest Wright, Minimal Processing, Training | No Responses »

Keeping the minimal processing dialog going

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Jack McCarthy brings up some good points about the challenges of minimal processing. And it’s so great to get some feedback from an experienced archivist! However, his blog post has brought to my attention a new concern; that our boot camp does not clearly express a crucial aspect of our methodology – that our processing plans are designed to be a starting point.

In fact, Jack’s concern about destroying important original order is already on our radar, and we work very hard to ensure that poor (and irreversible) processing decisions are not made. That is why we create processing plans for every collection and why we do not treat all collections the same. Sometimes, as in the case of Jack’s collection, we do advise our processors to separate materials by genre, other times we absolutely do not. It all depends on our impression of each collection, information found in the survey, the collection’s custodial history, what the repository archivist has to say, and our time frame. All of these issues are taken into consideration before we finalize the processing plan. In many cases, we work with whatever order is apparent to avoid separating materials in that manner, often advising our processors to resist the urge to over-complicate matters by trying to impose some complicated, unnecessary arrangement. Before any arrangement decisions are acted on, the processors are instructed to read the entire processing plan and review the physical collection to form their own opinions.

We know, while we get it right a lot of the time, we are not right 100% of the time, and our processors are encouraged to talk to each other, repository staff, and us about the collections if they disagree with our proposed plan and they do. In Jack’s case, if memory serves, we discussed his concerns and, for one of the folders in question, I felt he was correct; the papers should stay together and in the end they did. In the other instances, I felt it was not as much of a concern for a few reasons: 1) At the moment we discussed the issue, he and his partner had not been able to identify a common link between the materials in the folder, 2) I did not believe that a decision in either direction would negatively impact the use or value of the materials for this particular collection, and 3) Holly had already seen the collection, created the processing plan, looked at the papers again, and stood by her decision. In the end, I believe Jack decided to leave some of the folders intact and I am OK with his decision to approach the collection in this different way.

The bottom line is that nothing about our project is set in stone – it cannot be. That is what makes training for minimal processing so difficult and why we are constantly looking for ways to make our training (and methodology, for that matter) better and stronger. We can not provide an example for every potential scenario. Nor can we allow our students to ponder every decision they will be asked to make, although we have them working in teams so that they can discuss issues such as this. Minimal processing is tricky, especially at two hours per linear foot, and we know it. That is why we create the processing plans and why we encourage and rely on our processors to express their opinions when they feel our suggestions are wrong or will negatively affect the collection in some profound way. By having these conversations, we hope that the best possible approach to processing can be identified and implemented.

Jack’s observations and concerns underscore the importance of keeping the dialog going; sharing our thoughts and experiences, as we as a profession continue to test the limits, and pros and cons of minimal processing. His comments will certainly be taken into consideration as we move forward in our project, creating processing plans, guiding our student teams, and in future “boot camps.”

Posted in Minimal Processing, Project Archivist, Training | No Responses »

Reflections on Training and the PACSCL/CLIR Project, by Jack McCarthy, CA, Archival Consultant

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

I recently had the opportunity to participate in the PACSCL Hidden Collections project Archival Boot Camp, the training session for the student processing archivists that will be working on the next phase of the project. While not involved in the PACSCL project myself, I am developing a project with somewhat similar goals that focuses on the collections of small, primarily volunteer-run organizations such as local historical societies, small museums, and other collecting institutions. Since my project may involve training entry-level archivists in surveying and processing collections held by these small repositories, I wanted to observe the training sessions of the PACSCL project to see how it was done in that project.

Overall, I found the Boot Camp to be a well structured, well-presented session and an effective method for training young archivists in the minimal processing practices that they will be implementing in the PACSCL project. Project Manager Holly Mengel and Project Archivist Courtney Smerz did a good job of presenting the rationale and theory behind minimal processing, providing guidelines for the minimal processing practices that will be employed in the project, and supervising the hands-on sessions in which the participants had the opportunity put those guidelines into practice. I especially liked the fact that Holley and Courtney were more interested in determining what worked and what didn’t in their approach to minimal processing than in trying to “prove” that theirs was the best approach. As per one of the goals of the PACSCL project, they are seeking to develop a model for applying minimal processing techniques to different types of collections – not just the large late twentieth-century collections that minimal processing was initially developed to address – and so they want honest assessments of both the positive and negative aspects of the methodology they have developed for the project.

Which brings me to the one problem I had with that methodology: While I found the guidelines and minimal processing practices presented in the Boot Camp to be sound and workable for the most part, and while I believe that the project is achieving its goal of making previously hidden collections more accessible in a cost-effective manner, there is one specific practice that is part of the project’s processing approach that I was uncomfortable with from an archival standpoint. It involves separating materials into distinct series when it is not clear that they actually constitute separate series, specifically the practice of taking a file that consists of a mix of different types of materials lumped together and separating these materials out into discrete series, but – and this is the critical point – without the opportunity to examine the items sufficiently to determine how they relate to one another and if they really do constitute separate series. Essentially, I feel that this is asking the processor to make item-level decisions but in a minimal processing time frame, without having the time to work with the materials enough to make informed decisions.

One of the key first steps in the processing procedure in which we were trained entails spreading a collection out and determining, fairly quickly, what series the materials should be divided into. Often, this is obvious – these diaries constitute one series, these photographs constitute another, etc. – but sometimes it is not so obvious and the decisions are more difficult. For the hands-on portion of the training, held at the Independence Seaport Museum, we broke into teams of two at one point and each team was given a small collection to process. My partner and I had the papers of George Sproule, a prominent figure in the Philadelphia maritime and shipping industry in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. We determined most of the series (diaries, scrapbooks, photo files) without much difficulty, but there was one group of materials consisting of several thick folders containing hundreds of different types of items – correspondence, reports and business records, clippings, writings and speeches, ephemera such as invitations and event programs, and other materials – all lumped together in no apparent order. Our instructions were to separate these materials out into different series by type – correspondence in one series, clippings in another, etc. As we started to do this, I began to get uncomfortable, realizing that I really couldn’t tell what belonged together and what did not, as there were several instances in which we ended up separating materials that actually related to each other: a piece of correspondence related to an event program, or a newspaper clipping related to a speech for which there was a copy in the file. These were just a couple of the inter-relationships we were able to discern in a quick review of the records; I am sure they were many more cases of related items that we didn’t catch. By separating these items from each other I felt that we were severing the ties between them and hampering future users’ ability to see the relationship between them. I didn’t think that we had enough time to make the kind of series determinations we were being asked to make, at least with this specific set of materials.

In my opinion, when presented with such situations, it would be best to adopt a “first, do no harm” approach. Given the limited amount of time available in a minimal processing project, if there are materials about which there is some ambiguity as to their organization or interrelationships, it would be best to just leave them as is. I do not think that this approach would significantly inhibit access to a collection. A researcher using a collection would, I think, be well-served by having such materials left as they were, but with a series-level scope and content note in the finding aid providing the necessary descriptive detail about the contents of the series.

This one critique notwithstanding, I found the Boot Camp to be a very worthwhile experience and the overall approach to minimal processing employed in the project to be excellent. I think that the PACSCL Hidden Collections project is doing a great service to the archival community on several levels: the participating PACSCL repositories and their users are getting important but hidden collections arranged and described, a group of young archivists is getting excellent hands-on experience in archival processing, and the archival profession is getting a tested model for making collections available relatively quickly and cost-effectively.

Posted in All Posts, Guest Blogger, Independence Seaport Museum, Minimal Processing, Training | No Responses »

Spring 2010 Boot Camp at Independence Seaport Museum

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

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!

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Posted in All Posts, Independence Seaport Museum, Training | No Responses »

End of Year Report: 2009

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

PACSCL/CLIR “Hidden Collections” Project
July to December 2009
Well, the first six months of the “Hidden Collections” Project have come and gone and it has been a whirlwind! The entire project team was assembled, manuals and standards were created, student processors were trained, 18 collections were processed at the rate of 2.84 hours per linear foot, and we learned that minimal processing works for almost all collections, not just late 20th century institutional records!

The project team consists of Project Archivist, Courtney Smerz; Student Processors Leslie O’Neill, Laurie Rizzo, Eric Rosenzweig and Forrest Wright; and me, the Project Manager. We worked with a wide variety of collections which span the 18th to 20th centuries and cover, at the broadest level, the topics of Quakerism, colleges and universities, and medicine. These collections include institutional, family, and personal papers.

As proposed in More Product, Less Process by Greene and Meissner, institutional records do work best. On average, these collections, largely at Drexel University, were processed at an average of 2.18 hours per linear foot. Personal papers, at Drexel University College of Medicine and Haverford College, were the next easiest, and these were processed at an average of 2.25 hours per linear foot. Family papers are, by far, the hardest, taking significantly more time per collection. Our average for processing family records is 4 hours per linear foot (which is still in the minimal processing range, as suggested by MPLP). The issues that make family papers difficult, to name just a few, are the number of family members contributing to the collection, the time span of the collection which often crosses several generations, and the fact that a good deal of the correspondence is not actually addressed or signed with a person’s name. Quite frequently, letters are sent to “Dear son,” or signed “Your loving mother.” When working with one person’s records, this is not quite as daunting as when you have 4 or 5 potentials for the “mother” and an endless number of possible “sons.” The 19th and 20th century Quakers, the main source of our family collections in this first semester, have a few truly delightful quirks which made processing their collections just a tiny bit trickier. For example, they consistently name their children after relatives … so it is entirely possible to have several Jane Rhoads in one collection. Moreover, in these collections, once they married, in-laws became “mother,” “father,” “sister,” and “brother,” making even the most general identification of senders and recipients virtually impossible in the minimal processing world.

We also discovered that there are some downsides to minimal processing, particularly in the description of collections. Moving through a collection at the rate this project demands means that absorbing content is really difficult. For the first semester, I created processing plans (Courtney is taking over for the rest of the project) for the collections on our list and wrote biographical/historical notes. I think minimal processing at 2 hours per linear foot without the processing plans and rough notes would be absolutely impossible–sometimes the physical processing cannot be done in that time frame.

At this point in the project, I am not sure that I would recommend minimal processing at 2 hours per linear foot–it is just too fast. 4 hours per linear foot, I think, would be a completely different story. Minimal processing, of which I am a fan, really does work and more importantly, it makes the collection available to the researchers long before it could be if we demanded full processing. Although I have not had the luxury of trying minimal processing at 4 hours per linear foot, I am convinced those additional two hours would result in more content and more thorough and accurate biography/history notes and scope and contents notes. My biggest fear with our notes is that we don’t know enough to let the researchers know that the collection contains the material they are seeking. Time will tell once researcher discover these previously hidden, and now “unhidden” collections!

Following, a list of collections processed, the project timeline from June to December, and looking forward:

Collections Processed
18 Collections
255.5 linear feet at an average of 2.84 hours per linear foot

Drexel University

College of Engineering Records

Evening College Records

Library Records

Drexel University College of Medicine

American Women’s Hospital Service Records

Anny Elston Papers

Bertha Van Hoosen Papers

Bradford Collection

Knerr/Hering Collection

Haverford College

Bowles Family Correspondence

Douglas and Dorothy Steere Papers

Harold Chance Papers

Hilles Family Papers

James Wood Family Papers

John Davison Papers

Nicholson and Taylor Family Papers

Reinhardt, Hawley and Hewes Family Papers

Sarah Wistar Rhoads Family Papers

Vaux Family Papers

Project Time line: July to December 2009

July 8, 2009: Holly Mengel starts work as Project Manager

September 28, 2009: Courtney Smerz starts work as Project Archivist

October 2, 2009: Leslie O’Neill, Laurie Rizzo, Eric Rosenzweig and Forrest Wright are hired as Student Processors

October 13-15, 2009: Processing Boot Camp

October 19, 2009: Laurie Rizzo and Eric Rosenzweig start processing collections at Drexel University and Drexel University College of Medicine

October 20, 2009: Leslie O’Neill and Forrest Wright start processing collections at Haverford College

November 10, 2009: Refresher training

December 11, 2009: Finish processing at Drexel University and Drexel University College of Medicine

December 15, 2009: Laurie Rizzo and Eric Rosenzweig start processing at the Wagner Free Institute of Science

December 23, 2009: Finish processing at Haverford College

Looking forward:

Currently processing at the Wagner Free Institute of Science (due for completion on January 19).

Begin processing at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (tentative start date: January 20).

Currently processing at Bryn Mawr College (due for completion on February 18).

Posted in All Posts, Drexel University, Drexel University College of Medicine, Haverford College, Minimal Processing, Project Manager, Training | No Responses »

George A. Hay at DUCOM

Friday, November 13th, 2009

I am pleased to say, about two weeks after-the-fact, that our training collection, The George A. Hay Collection of Administrative Records of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (I know, it’s a mouthful) is finally finished! As I alluded to in my previous entry, this collection was a bit of a beast and perhaps, in hindsight, not the best candidate for training. Even so, I think it turned out really well all things considered and now the Drexel University College of Medicine Archives (DUCOM) has a much, much better idea of all the goodies they have in that collection!

Essentially, what we learned through processing the collection and from the accession record is that DUCOM archives has George Hay, who was the comptroller for the Woman’s Medical College in the mid-twentieth century, to thank for ensuring the survival of these records and their disposition in the archives. Not only did he turn over his own materials, but he also made sure to hand over records that came into his possession over the years of other important personnel. As a result, the collection, though roughly 30% is in fact Hay’s papers, is an assemblage of institutional records produced by leading administrators of the Woman’s Medical College throughout the mid-twentieth century. There are records for Sarah Starr, Dr. Ellen Culver Potter and Vida Hunt Francis, and within these groups researchers will also find correspondence with and other records related to Dr. Martha Tracy—all notable women in institutional history as well as the general history of women in medicine.

*For those of you who don’t know, the Woman’s Medical College was an amazing institution founded in Philadelphia in the mid nineteenth century to train–you guessed it–woman doctors! More on that and other related collections can be found here: http://archives.drexelmed.edu.

All in all, I think the Hay Collection is pretty good and it has some noteworthy documentation, especially records relating to proposed institutional mergers with other hospitals and schools in the Philadelphia area. Taken together, the records shed light on a few key events in institutional history and may inform study of the history of medicine, especially the administrative side of medical education and, to a lesser extant, how related cultural changes affected the education of women in medicine.

An especially fun file, titled in a manner to pique any researcher’s interest, “the Louise Wright ‘Incident,’” details a student’s efforts and publicized fight against her suspension from Woman’s Medical College in 1891 (Hay also somehow acquired a handful of very early institutional records and gave them to the archives as well). What the “incident” was exactly is not quite clear, though it received much publicity. Louise Wright, I assume, contacted the local press, and the story as well as a chain of correspondence between Wright and the college regarding the matter was published in the newspaper.

As far as minimal processing goes, the Hay Collection definitely deserved more than our allotted two hours per linear foot — in the end, I think I gave it closer to four hours though I can’t say for sure and it probably could use even a little more TLC in a perfect world. When we found it, the collection was pretty mixed up (thank goodness for that accession file) and it was partially processed. I still can’t decide if this partial processing helped or hindered our effort… At least after processing the collection has a basic arrangement and is described fairly well. A lot of individual files in the collection are still a mess and it could use some more re-foldering, but that’s nothing that a second go ‘round by the archivist (or a well trained student intern) couldn’t fix. And anyway, I sincerely believe the collection is now usable in a way it was not before so from that perspective I think minimal processing did very well by it.

Posted in All Posts, Drexel University College of Medicine, Project Archivist, Training | No Responses »

Training … from a Trainee’s Perspective

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Last week the three other collection processors and I completed a three-day intensive training for the Hidden Collections Project. The training was affectionately termed, “Archivist Bootcamp.” Luckily, we didn’t have to shave our heads and even though it was kind of warm in the off-site storage facility that we meet in on the third day, I never broke a sweat! That being said I learned so much and am extremely excited about the project.

During our training we received an orientation to the finer details of the project, clarified terms and concepts and discussed our concerns about minimal processing. We did a paleography and photography workshop, received hands-on training with the new release of Archivist Toolkit 2.0 and minimally processed a collection as a group. This gave us the opportunity to examine the process, problem solve and troubleshoot issues that may arise when we process the collections for the project.

Since the processing involves so many collections and many different institutions, consistency is extremely important to us. The Archivist Bootcamp ensured that we are all on the same page with the process being that we will be working in smaller teams at different facilities beginning Monday!

Posted in All Posts, Collection Processors, Laurie Rizzo, Training | No Responses »

BOOT CAMP!

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

We trained our first group of student processors October 13-15, and we can only hope that the students learned as much as Courtney Smerz, project archivist, and I did! Our students, all bright and enthusiastic Drexel University iSchool students, are Leslie O’Neill, Laurie Rizzo, Eric Rosenzweig and Forrest Wright. The energy and interest they exhibited during this week reassured me that this project CAN be a success!

In training, we covered an overview of the project, basic processing theory, minimal processing theory, pre-20th century paleography, biographical and historical notes, scope and content notes and abstracts, the Archivists’ Toolkit, and hands-on processing. This seemed like a lot to accomplish in a three day period.

We planned for two days in the electronic classroom and one day for hands-on processing, but we quickly found that the two days in the electronic classroom was too much. So, on Tuesday evening, I placed a call to the remarkably flexible Drexel University crew and asked if we could start hands-on processing Wednesday afternoon instead of Thursday morning. Already, we learned that the hands-on work is where the real learning happens—across the board: photographs, writing notes, deciphering handwriting, and the Archivists’ Toolkit. ESPECIALLY the Archivists’ Toolkit! Because we finished the other training earlier than I anticipated, I attempted an explanation of the Archivists’ Toolkit without examples, and it was a dismal failure. The next day, however, our processors entered faux container lists into the Archivists’ Toolkit and every topic I had tried to explain the day before was made obvious.

The same thing happened with hands-on processing at Drexel’s off-site storage facility. The environment is terrific for group processing: a huge table on which to spread out a collection, chairs all around, and not a soul to disturb with conversation about the best way to process. With Drexel University College of Medicine’s George Hay collection before them, our student processors started asking all the right questions and, with a little guidance, answered them. The collection was not processed at the rate of two hours per linear foot, but we talked about issues and made certain that our processors are prepared for working next week!

The “Hidden Collections” Project has processed its first collection! A sincere thank you to Drexel University’s wonderful staff, Rob Sieczkiewicz of Drexel University Archives and Margaret Graham and Lisa Grimm of Drexel University College of Medicine, for helping to make our first hands-on training session possible and successful!

Posted in Drexel University, Drexel University College of Medicine, Institutions, Project Manager, Training | No Responses »

PACSCL Hidden Collections Processing Project

Revealing the Unknown Stories of the Philadelphia Region