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ARCHIVAL PROCESSING AND DESCRIPTION
(Practices, Dreams, Realities, Projects)
Library vs. Archives Materials
Secondary sources Self-conscious
creations Items collected and
classified at individual level
Items described according to well-established standards
Primary sources Created in course of
business/life Items collected and
classified in aggregate
Description standards only recently established
Library (“neat”) Archives (“messy”)
Library Archive
(Illustrated Visually)
Archival Functions
Appraise Acquire Arrange Describe Preserve Make accessible
[For this presentation, we are concentrating on arrangement and description]
Archival Arrangement
1) Variety: the only constant
2) Provenance
3) Original Order
4) Levels
5) Physical vs. intellectual order
Variety is the spice of archival life
Collections vary greatly in size, format and complexity.
Provenance
The context in which records were created is important to understanding historical significance, therefore-
The materials generated by one individual, organization or department should not be combined with the materials of another.
Examples: College of Agricultural Science Records Conrad Richter Papers Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights
Original Order
Important in theory, but often violated in practice
Materials should be kept in the order in which they were originally created, maintained or used.
However, materials often come to us in no usable order.
Levels
Collection, series, subseries Series often determined by subject,
function, or form Within a series, filing system:
chronological, geographical, alphabetical, etc.
Intellectual vs. physical order One intellectual series could include all
materials on a selected topic, however those materials could be:
papers (one area of stacks), books (another area of stacks), maps (require flat storage), and photographs (require cold storage)
This complicates retrieval as well as arrangement and description.
Describe
1) Standards – DACS
2) Methods- Database tracking Finding aids Catalog records
DACS: Describing Archives, a Content Standard
Some of the elements addressed by DACS:
Required elements for different levels of description (minimum, optimum, added value)
Title formationForms of namesElements and examples of biographies and
collection overviews
(And much, much more)
Database tracking (Oliver homepage)
Oliver Screenshot 2 (HCLA collections)
Oliver Screenshot 3 (collection-items)
Finding Aids
Information contained: Administrative information (extent,
restrictions, etc.) Institutional History or Biography Collection overview Series Arrangement and Descriptions Box/folder lists
Formats: Can be Word, PDF, HTML, EAD
Online Finding Aid Formats
No metadata tagged, but information still online
Findable through Google
Searchable through “Find in page”
Relatively quick and easy
Metadata such as creator, subjects, date ranges all tagged
Enables sharing with consortia and more precise retrieval
Takes more time/training to encode
Search software only in beginning stages
HTML EAD
Examples
HTML: Robert T. Oliver papershttp://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/findingaids/1086.htm
EAD: T.R. Johns papershttp://www.libraries.psu.edu/digital/findingaids/2/johns.frame.html
Robert T. Oliver Papers Finding Aid Screenshot
T.R. Johns Papers Finding Aid Screenshot
Sample EAD code
<origination label="Creator"><persname encodinganalog="100" source="lcnaf">Coit, Margaret L., 1919-2003</persname> </origination>
<unittitle label="Title" encodinganalog="245">Margaret L. Coit Papers, <date type="inclusive" normal="1864/2003">1864-2003,</date> (bulk <date type="bulk" normal="1921/1999">1921-1999)</date></unittitle>
<bioghist> <head>Biographical Note</head> <p><persname>Margaret Louise Coit</persname> was born 30 May 1919 in
Norwich, Connecticut, to <persname>Archa Willoughby Coit</persname>, a stockbroker, and <persname>Grace Coit</persname> (nee Trow), the principal of a private day school. Two years later, Margaret's sister Grace was born with Down Syndrome. Caring for Grace would take up much of Coit's adult life.</p>
<p> At the start of the Great Depression, Coit's family moved to <geogname>Greensboro, North Carolina</geogname>, where Coit attended <corpname>Curry School</corpname>, a training school located on the grounds of <corpname>Woman's College</corpname> (now the <corpname>University of North Carolina at Greensboro</corpname>, or <corpname>UNCG</corpname>). </p>
Catalog records
The Dream
In the ideal “hierarchy of surrogacy”, we’d have finding aids for all collections that include item-level inventories, and catalog records that include collection-level summaries and point to those finding aids.
Collection (tracked by database) described by finding aid summarized by catalog record
The cold hard reality (boo!)
At Special Collections institutions in general*
Processing time: mean of 14.8 hours per linear foot
Backlog statistics: 34% of institutions say more than half of their collections are unprocessed, 60% at least a third unprocessed
(Cold, hard reality continued) At PSU Special
Collections: About 75% of our
collections are in the Cat About 30% of our
collections have finding aids
About 25% of our collections have neither (“hidden collections”)
*Meissner-Greene
“More product, less process” (MPLP)
Sacrifice detail in order to describe everything at collection level first, so that researchers know what you have
Processing can be flexible, different levels between and within collections
“Good processing is done with a shovel, not with tweezers”
Pertinent PSU Specoll Projects
Core records Make catalog records at COLLECTION level
for all
Finding aids Generate HTML finding aids from Oliver
Future plans New database system and more EAD
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