I’ve
talked about original order and provenance before and noted that problems result when these rules are
ignored. Once collections are divided provenance can be lost. Once original order is ignored, the organizational scheme of the creator is lost. Basically trying to recreate what was changed often takes
too long and may cause more problems.
You must compromise. For
archivists the goal is to expedite processing to enable accessibility and gain
intellectual control over the collection.
Even if you could undo well-intentioned destruction of original order budgetary
constraints and time often provide limitations.
The collection that I am working on is a case in point. It is photographs. The collection arrived at the library
from the Public Relations Office and the Alumni Association although it is not
really clear who sent what. The original creator department is not known as the records have
been passed around and stored hither and yon throughout the university. So we don’t know who collected the
photographs and we don’t know the organizational structure that was used
because that’s been lost over time. Some of the photographs are numbered
although exactly what the numbering means is not altogether clear. Some of the
photographs arrived at the library when a building on campus was being
renovated. The rest came from a
retiring staff member’s office.
Unfortunately she was a saver, but not particularly well organized. Boxes from her office had little to no
organization with photographs and unrelated papers mixed together.
 |
| An example of one of the smaller boxes of miscellaneous material |
I
spent the good part of a year trying to impose some order to the records and
attempt to find any underlying order that might still exist. First step was to accept that that the
original order could not always either be determined or be restored. The next was for the library to make
some decision about what they would preserve and what they could not. As we talked about before, not
everything should and can saved. Our problems were acaerbated when the archives had to be moved again
because the room where they were housed was needed as a classroom. Time
was short. Did I mention that
money was also limited particularly for archival storage material? The best we could do were a few
archival sleeves, but we did have archival folders and acid-free boxes. It was a start towards preservation and
organization, but definitely a compromise.
The
first step in dealing with a collection like this is to do an appraisal and
come up with a processing plan.
That required looking into each box and trying not to become too
overwhelmed. No one had gone through the photographs to weed out those that
were not particularly good. Most had no identification. Some had been used in previous
publications or appear to have been.
Some were professional photographs. Some were simply candids - some good and some bad. Did
I mention that there are over 10,000 photographs not counting negatives and
slides? As part of the plan that was
developed the library staff made some decisions of what to keep and what to
discard. For example, yearbook
photographs were already digitized so they were not kept nor were poor
photographs (out of focus, head chopped off, poor lighting, lots of pictures of
unidentified Homecoming bonfires – that sort of thing). What organization that
could be determined was kept. For
example, there was an entire box labeled “Social Clubs.” This became one of the
sub-series under a series called “Students.” Examples of the series developed include the following:
Buildings; Athletics; and People.
People had sub-series of Faculty, Board of Trustees, and so forth. Each series has files, such as early
buildings or current buildings under the series “Buildings”; for the series "Athletics" the files are football or baseball,
etc.). These series seemed to have been part of the underlying order as
best we could determine.
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| At least the outside box was labeled even if the photographs weren't |
The
best way to approach a mess like this is one box at a time. At least that’s what seemed to work for
us. I think that is the approach
to use when sorting through papers at home too. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. We had one of an emeritus professor help us with some identifications. He wasn’t emeritus enough to be able to
identify everyone, but it helped. The next step is digitization and that means
item level numbering and metadata (information) and I hope best practice
collection care. Oh help! Must remember one box at a time.
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