We had the good fortune today to speak with Jenn Parent, an archivist with the Museum of Flight and a graduate of our MLIS program. We talked about ways to approach the inventory, assessment and processing of the room, and her insight as a working, professional archivist was valuable.
One of her suggestions was to use "extensible processing" to process the materials. We quickly got our hands on a manual so we could get started.
Extensible Processing uses Greene and Meissener’s “More Product Less Process” approach to get material findable quickly and reduce backlogs. We can make collections more visible by doing a baseline finding aid to represent the materials by what is known at the time of processing rather than holding up workflows to dive deep to the item level description. We start with the big ideas and expand as time and research interest allow. It breaks it down to 6 key principles:
Create a baseline level of access to all collections material.
Create standardized, structured description.
Manage archival materials in the aggregate.
Do no harm: limit physical handling and processing.
Iterate by conducting further processing in a systematic but flexible way.
Approach processing holistically
And an 8-part workflow:
Review documentation and available data
Survey collection and crete processing plans
Conduct appraisal
Conduct physical processing
Create descriptive data
Deliver descriptive data and archival content
Track and analyze use and assessment data -Prioritize collections for additional descriptive work -Prioritize collections for digitization
Begin digital and additional processing (if needed)
This sounds like the best way to get the BHSA materials accessible to researchers!
Santamaria, D. A. (2015). Extensible processing for archives and special collections: reducing processing backlogs. Chicago, IL: Neal-Schuman, an imprint of the American Library Association.
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