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https://connect.archivists.org/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=6698956c-adef-4b94-addc-018f35a7c9c0
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The Collection Management section meeting will include a brief business meeting to review the work of the section this year as well as an update from the SAA Council. Following this we will hear from three speakers from on their experience managing backlogs and legacy collections. Please see the abstracts below to learn more about these presentations.
Hope to see you there!
Shelflist Project Leveraged for Backlog Exposure/Minimal Records: William W. Hardesty, Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives
The offsite storage facility of Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives houses about 5,000 boxes, some stored for decades and many an unprocessed backlog. In 2022, the boxes were palletized and relocated while contractors rebuilt the stacks, increasing capacity in part by reorienting how boxes sit on the shelf. Once movers returned the material, most of the boxes were (1) out of order and (2) lacked any visible identification because their labeled side was hidden on the new shelves. In 2022-23, I led a project to achieve basic physical control by inspecting each box's exterior and, using a set of double stickers, labeling the boxes and creating a simple paper shelflist. The location information was then transferred to our ArchivesSpace instance. Once the project was complete, each offsite box and its location, and the extent of each accession, was known definitely. With that information, the flexibility of the ArchivesSpace PUI, and new reference policies and tools, we decided to start exposing the backlog for potential use without "processing" it. We are publishing minimal ArchivesSpace resources and deferring evaluation and description of these collections until researchers request them.
Consolidating legacy collections: Maya Naunton, American Museum of Natural History
The archive at the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History grew out organically out of its 130 year history. There was no plan and the papers in the archive accumulated as the members of the staff retired or left their positions. An IMLS grant that the department received in 2020 was designed to remedy the situation. The papers in the archive were surveyed during the first part of the grant. The next part involved processing collections and writing finding aids. When faced with that part of the work, I had to wrestle with the fact that the portions of the archive that have been processed were not done in a holistic logical way. Multiple collections were grouped in ways that didn't make sense. After consulting with the staff in the main library and archive of the museum, I decided to completely rework the way the collections were organized and created a spreadsheet to record the relationship between the old organization and the new. After the changes were agreed to, 2 steps needed to happen: (1) The entries in ArchivesSpace needed to be updated to reflect the new organization, and (2) The labels on physical boxes needed to be updated with new information. The ArchivesSpace work was done by the Metadata Librarian in the main library and the staff in the archive of the department of Vertebrate Paleontology updated the box labels. As the result of this work the archive was reorganized in a logical way and the number of collections went from 73 to 41. I would like to talk about the necessity of biting the bullet and going back to the basics to remedy legacy processing in order to make progress in the archive.
Curatorial review/backlog project, Mae Casey, Pennsylvania State University Libraries
This is a discussion of a year-long curatorial review project in the Penn State Eberly Family Special Collections Library to gain physical and intellectual control over 268.25 linear feet of unknown archival and rare book materials. While we now have strong accessioning and processing workflows to prevent the backlog growing, we had never dealt with the significant number of "hidden" items piled up over the years our framework was less standardized. This project involved appraising, consolidating, and sorting these materials. The first two weeks were about reorganizing the materials and creating a basic inventory that I entered and tracked with a spreadsheet. From there, we performed research on the unknown materials to determine provenance and/or relationship to our collections. This allowed us to develop recommendations for disposition of items. These recommendations were presented in individual meetings with members of our curatorial team where we asked them to make final decisions on retention. The result of this project is that, in the last year, we have reduced this unidentified backlog to just 66 linear feet and are slowly adding the previously unknown items to our archival and rare book collections. I believe that sharing the details of our process, including our successes, lessons learned, and suggestions, would provide guidance and support to peers in similar situations.
