Recording Available: "2022 Annual Meeting with Collection Move Presentations"

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The Collection Management section meeting included a brief business meeting to review the work of the section this year as well as an update from the Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards.

Following this we heard from three speakers from various institution types (university, business and museum) on their collections moves and lessons learned. Please see the abstracts below to learn more about these presentations.

Lynsey Allie, Allie Archival Consulting

Even small, local organizations can have large collections and moving them can be a bigger undertaking than one might think. After being involved with two separate museum and collections moves, the trials and tribulations shared here should help others in their own move.

Erin Grady, Gap Inc. Heritage Lab

This is the 3rd space move I’ve done during my career of 4.5 years at Gap Inc., and it’s the worst one to date. My 2 largest repositories, the Processing Room and the Oversize Room, were scheduled to be moved as part of the building restructure initiative, Future of Work. However, I was not aware of these plans. Somehow every part of this move was botched. From shelving and room mismeasurements to active water mains in my new space – it was truly a nightmare.I am still dealing with the ramifications of this move 7 months out. 

Camila Zorrilla Tessler, Yale University

In 2014 The Ohio State University hired a term position archivist to oversee the move of several thousand linear feet of collection material to an off-site long term storage facility. This presentation will detail that move, the choices made, and reflect on what I would do differently now that I am a more experienced archivist. This presentation also hopes to address the successes and the challenges faced by archivists who are given large scale moves and aims to examine how supervisors, institutions, and invested stakeholders such as curators can support them.