Last Friday I hopped on my bike and, after a while of being lost on the University of Minnesota’s West Bank, finally made it to the third of my internships this semester. I talked a little bit about it in a post last week, but here’s the whole spiel.
Of all the experience I’ve gotten and am getting this semester, one of the things glaringly missing was experience doing one of the day-to-day kinds of archival functions: processing. I even heard back after interviewing for an entry-level archives reference position over the summer that, though the position didn’t call for processing experience per se, and thought they had been impressed with my resume and my enthusiasm, the job had been offered to another candidate because they had had experience processing and I didn’t. It seemed pretty necessary that I get some under my belt before getting out on the job market.
What is processing, you may ask? Here’s what the SAA (Society of American Archivists) has to say:
“The arrangement, description, and housing of archival materials for storage and use by patrons” (from the SAA Glossary)
To put it simply, it is cataloging for the archives profession. However, it’s a little different than describing one item at a time like the library profession does with each book. Archival processing uses the collection as the whole unit; for example, a collection could be a group of papers by one author, or a series of leaflets and pamphlets by one organization. Beginning with the collection as a whole, an archivist will first arrange the materials into series, or large meaningful divisions of materials. For example, an author’s papers (the collection) might be divided into literary manuscripts, personal correspondence, and professional reviews/clippings (the series). Each of these series will contain several files (e.g. the correspondence from persons A, B, and C within the correspondence series) and items (e.g. an individual letter within the person A file within the correspondence series). In this way, the arrangement is all about levels.
Since archives budgets are shrinking all over the US, a method of minimal description has been lauded as a way to provide some description while giving minimal time and staff effort. This process involves the arrangement of the collection into series and files, but does not allow description down to the item level. So, in a case like this, an archivist would describe and create lists of the series in the collection and files in each series, but would not go through and make a list of, or describe, every individual document in each file. Even though there might be unknown items after this process, researchers will still know what kinds of materials are available (series), and more specifically what they can expect to find and utilize (files), but will then have to use their own time to come find the information they are looking for. This minimal processing is generally referred to as the MPLP approach, named after the groundbreaking “More Product, Less Process” article written by Mark Greene of Wyoming and Dennis Meissner of the Minnesota Historical Society.
This is the process I will be using in my work at the Tretter collection. On Friday I went in for my first full day in the archives. This semester I will be working on the collection of a U of M professor emeritus named Lisa Albrecht, whose work mainly revolves around lesbian feminist theory and educational pedagogy. There will be a few series in the collection, one of which is her personal library of published materials. As I’m starting at the beginning (a very good place to start), I’m taking it slow by creating the documentation for these published materials first. It’s simple work so far, but takes some methodical and deliberate work anyhow. Seven hours of my Friday was spent recording bibliographic information and reboxing the books on the topic “Feminist and Multicultural Education Pedagogy.” Then there will be women’s poetry. Then periodicals. This is likely to take a few weeks, and then it will be on to the personal papers (writings, correspondence, etc.). These actually have yet to come in to the archives (Lisa is working on putting things together and writing a little helpful description herself in preparation for the archival description), so who knows what exactly it is, and how much, and what about.
Even after one day of doing the ‘easy stuff’ (published materials), though, I feel that much more sure of what I want to do, and how to go about doing it. The experience will definitely be worth the time and effort this semester. We’ll see what the next Friday brings!
A Fuzzbee in the Archives 