Purpose:
In the inter-connected world, patrons expect immediate access to information of all kinds. But archivists and curators of manuscripts face a difficulty in providing instant access. Modern collections of personal papers can comprise hundreds of cubic feet of heterogeneous material. Even smaller collections can include papers, photographs, sound recordings, and electronic records, among other formats. And such collections differ from books in that each one is unique and no table of contents is included to assist the process of evaluation. In order to make personal papers useable, archivists, curators, and special collections librarians create finding aids. A finding aid may be anything from a catalog record to a calendar of individual items, but all require time to create. As a result many institutions have a backlog of undescribed collections that are invisible to researchers whose first (and often only) source of information is the internet.
The American Heritage Center is the University of Wyoming’s repository of manuscript collections, rare books, and university archives. The Center is supported by state taxes and by private donations and endowments. It is a public institution open to anyone who wishes to utilize its resources. No fees are charged for access. The Center’s ambitious collecting policy includes the history of Wyoming and the western United States, the American entertainment industry, 20th century mining and petroleum in many parts of the world, the environmental movement, aviation history, and journalism. The full-time staff, from clerical support to director, is usually about twenty.
In the mid-1970s the American Heritage Center began to lose control of its backlog. The problem was exacerbated in the 1990s when internet access created a demand for online finding aids, which had to be met by converting all legacy finding aids to electronic ones. By 2003, the Center had acquired 9490 individual collections comprising 87,050 cubic feet of material. Valiant effort on the part of the staff had converted 1890 finding aids to online format. Six thousand further collections had paper-based finding aids but no online presence. Sixteen hundred collections had no finding aid of any kind. Many of these backlogged collections were larger than the average, so although the number of undescribed collections was only 17% of the total, the overall volume was 34%. It was time for some drastic action.
Our goal was to reduce the time it took to create web-based finding aids for our archival and manuscript collections by experimenting with radical shifts in standard arrangement and description processes. We then had to assess the effectiveness of our experiments and integrate the successful new processes into our normal workflow.
Design, methodology or approach:
We began by assessing the effectiveness of our creation process, considering the number of collections completed per year and the number of people doing the work. The latter proved to be an extremely variable statistic as positions fell vacant and were re-filled or part-time and volunteer labor was added to the mix.
We then began to introduce innovations, including:
- collection level finding aid (catalog record) without lower level description;
- collection level finding aid (catalog record) linked to EAD (encoded archival description) without lower level description;
- legacy (not web-based) finding aid linked to EAD linked to catalog record.
Findings:
To increase speed of finding aid creation, we found it was better to create descriptions beginning with the general and moving to the particular rather than building from the particular to the general. We also found that it was desirable to bring groups of collections to an intermediate level of access together rather than moving each one individually from no access to full access. In this way we were able to carve out limited “projects” that could be assigned to less skilled or temporary workers.
Research or practical limitations or implications:
There are some concerns and practical limitations that must be confronted in such a project. The researcher will find more collections described but not to as great a level of detail. The curator must be prepared to give up some intellectual control and admit to not knowing everything that is in the collection. Neither the researcher nor the curator may assume that the description is either perfect or complete.
Conclusions:
When faced with a backlog, don’t try to do the same things faster, do different things. The problem of how to make archival collections accessible quickly without any increase in resources is not a simple one, and there is no one answer to it. The advancement of machine-searching is opening up possibilities, but it is necessary to abandon preconceptions to make best use of them.
Originality and value:
The concept of breaking out of traditional arrangement and description patterns was broached by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner in “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Thinking,” (American Archivist, Fall/Winter 2005). Greene was director of the American Heritage Center when the article appeared. MPLP (as the concept became known) was officially adopted by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which is responsible for issuing large grants to assist American archival repositories. The article, however, was a license to experiment not a roadmap. Specific ideas vary according to the needs and resources of different repositories. The projects described here were conceived, under Greene’s direction, by his staff and continued after his retirement in 2015.
Collections , Organisational issues , Services , Innovative Methods , Methods , Special Libraries
