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Re: processing procedure



Creating a standard processing procedure--What a topic for an archives  student.  I suspect it is about eqivalent to developing a perpetual motion maching for an engineering student.

Where does one start?

Once you get beyond the cardinal principles of provenance and original order I suspect it will be hard to get any two archivists to agree on how to proceed.  You might even get into a serious discussion on original order over what to do when you find an item that is very obviously misfiled.  Do you leave it where it was because of original order or do you file it where it logically should be filed?  

A major factor to consider is the wide variety in the types of collections and state and federal requirments for some.

Consider for the moment the official papers of a state governor and the papers of a memember of the legislature for the same years.  The Governor's papers are official records.  Thus the only things that can be removed are duplicates within an individual file folder and a limited amount of materials that might not be records of the Governor's office.  The latter might include such a bills introduced into the legislature that were not part of the Governor's legislative package and newsletters of other government offices.  No such restrictions pertain to papers of a member of the legislature.  A processing archivist can pick and choose what to keep and what to discard.

A while back there was a discussion on this list of collecting papers of faculty members.  There are a variety of issues to consider in this type of collections.
Some institutions might want to save virtually everything (including copies of all publications as well as the various drafts of them, all presentations including the various drafts, a sylabus for every class each time it is taught, copies of lecture notes and exams to see how the course was taught, and all personal papers including IRS returns and household bills to document how a typical faculty member lived at a given time) whereas other institutions without such a generous amount of space may choose to exclude all personal materials and very little else beside the faculty members vitae on the assumption that all pubications can be found elsewhere in a library somewhere, that most presentations ultimately ended up being publications, and that no one really cares how faculty members lived anyhow.  While these thoughts might seem to relate more to how things are collected than how they are processed, it might be argued that a standard processing procedure developed for one type of collecting will be of little or no use to collectiong acquired under a different philosophy.

I think that I will let it go at these few thoughts on the issue rather than belabor it with my typical three plus page response.
  


Charles R. Schultz, CA
Professor and Clements Archivist
Cushing Library
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX  77843-5000
c-schultz@tamu.edu
979-862-1555
FAX 979-845-1441

State-of-the-art automation will never beat the wastebasket 
when it comes to speeding up efficiency in the office.
Ann Landers Gem of the Day, July 27, 1994

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