Fall 2021
Learning how to process a collection - December 12, 2021
INFO 5240 was about archival arrangement and description. Going into this class I was quite worried I would not like it, which would be bad because I want to be an archivist. Happily, though, I thoroughly enjoyed this class. Similar to INFO 5200 and 5210, it taught me a lot about the actual meat and bones of librarianship and what archivist actually do on a day to day basis. Through the semester we continued to explore each step in the process of processing a collection, from accessioning to arrangement and finally description. We created both a processing plan and a finding aid during the course. I will take more about the finding aid in a later post because I think it deserves a more in-depth reflection. Some of the more memorable ideas that we discussed for the class were things like "More Product, Less Process," intellectual vs physical arrangement, and levels of description. These ideas have a significant impact on archival practice and can entirely change the ways we approach processing collections.
Processing a collection can either be a laborious process that takes month or even years or it can be very quick. It all depends on what standards we choose to follow when doing the work. MPLP as an approach suggests that we move through the process quickly by reducing the amount of item, and even folder, level work that we do. This will allow us to process more collections and reduce our backlog of unprocessed collections. After all, archives are in many ways useless if the collections that they contain are sitting around unprocessed and largely inaccessible to the public. I personally subscribe to idea that MPLP is good approach and one that many archives should be moving towards. Preservation is still important, obviously, but that type of work does not always need to be on an item level. If stored in the proper conditions, most collections do not need to be refoldered or even to have all their staples and paper clips removed. They will be perfectly fine in the short term. Of course, if the time can be found and the budget allows, it is never bad idea to go back through processed collections at a later date and do that sort of preservation work.
Creating a finding aid for the first time - December 14, 2021
As I stated previously, one of the assignments that we had to do for INFO 5240 was creating a finding aid. This was a very nerve-racking assignment for me because I was really worried that 1) I would not be good at it and 2) that I would not like it. Like I said in the previous post, I was happily surprised that I really did enjoy the work and it turned out that I was not bad at it either. It probably helped a little bit that the professor did throw us a bone by not making us work with an actual collection and thus we did not have to do all the research and preliminary work that we normally would have. She gave us all the background and historical information and all we had to do was format it correctly for DACS, or Describing Archives: A Content Standard. The part where we were really on our own was creating the arrangement for the collection. Professor Dodd had given us the intellectual tools necessary to do the work, we just had to put them to work.
Archival arrangement is very interesting because a layman might assume that the intellectual arrangement of a collection is the same as its physical arrangement, but this is not always true. Often collections are processed and physically put into boxes with no real thought to whether the contents of those boxes go together. This not really a problem though. The novelty of archival arrangement is that your intellectual arrangement, or how your collection is represented in a finding aid, can differ significantly from the physical arrangement of the collection. For example, let's say you have six boxes of materials and between those boxes you have various types or genres of materials. Maybe in one box you have letters that the collection's creator wrote to his family member right next to pictures that they took for a business venture they were a part of. In your finding aid, you can separate those two different types of materials intellectually into two separate series or groups. In this case, maybe one series is titled business visual media materials and the other is titled family correspondence. The names are not so important in right now, but the idea is that you can separate those materials intellectually without separating them physically. And that is what makes the work of archivists so interesting to me and at same time so complicated.
Running through a mock library disaster situation - December 20, 2021
In INFO 5295, I learned a lot about the preservation techniques and methods used in libraries and archives. One of the most important topics we discussed, however, was how to react to disaster situations. I had previously learned a bit about this topic in my special collections and archives class back in Fall 2020, but that class focused more on what the disasters were and how the affected institutions responded to them. In this class, we actually learned about what steps to take if we were in a disaster situation and how we could plan ahead for one. Part of this education involved putting us through a mock disaster situation. Simulation was carried out via a Zoom call with our professor. For the simulation, we were paired up with a few other classmates (I think around five people) and were given a time and date to show up to the zoom meeting. We were not told what was going to happen during the meeting nor what kind of disaster we would have to respond to. However, we were told what readings to review and given some other resources to view before the meeting so as to prepare us for whatever situation may befall our hypothetical library.
When it came time for the Zoom call, I was quite nervous and was really not sure what to expect. I logged onto the Zoom call and was greeted by the faces of my professor and a few of my classmates. The professor started the meeting by giving us a little talk about what she was expecting from us as a group and reaffirmed that she expected us all to participate in the conversation to come. She then began describing the situation we were going to have to deal with. For our group, the situation was basically that we were librarians at a small public library that was about to be hit by a severe storm and that we were supposed to prepare for and react to the situation that was about to happen. The professor walked us through the situation in a sort of minute by minute fashion and asked us to respond at each step with what we would do. For example, when we were informed that windows had been broken near the library's bookshelves and that there was rain coming in onto the shelves, we responded by saying we would cover the exposed bookshelves with tarps from the library's emergency supplies in order to keep the books as dry as possible until they could be removed. The meeting essentially continued with this back and forth discussion until eventually we got to the aftermath and cleanup of the disaster. We went through a final round of discussion about how the library might have better prepared for this kind of disaster and then the professor asked us what we thought about the experience before sending us on our way.
I thought the whole experience was quite exciting, and it was really interesting to sort of get an idea for how I might react in these types of situations. I also learned a lot, which is always a good thing. I think it was really helpful to walk through a disaster situation and have the professor give us feedback about what we did, and did not do. It allowed us to learn by doing but in a safe environment with no real consequences. I would definitely do it again given the chance. I also think that mock disaster training and emergency response plans are just great ideas that all information repositories should be implementing for the sake of both their employees and their collections. It is always better to have a plan and not need one than need a plan and not have one.