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Venting - the outcome



Good morning!

Several of you had expressed an interest to the outcome of an incident here
a little over a month ago while I was on vacation. To summarize what
happened, our managing director had taken it upon himself to arbitrarily
rearrange files and fixtures and to break up and interfile in purple file
folders a large and very valuable new collection, all with the intent of
helping me.

It turned out that nothing was lost due to the confounding of original
order, which had already been ruined by whoever boxed the records for
storage years ago. It took two weeks of my doing nothing but this to process
the rest of the collection, restore order to the files and refolder
everything. I purged the purple folders from the files, and now they are
being used for office records only.

The biggest problem he created was in moving our two flat files. To do this,
he and his assistant simply pulled the drawers out, contents and all, and
tilted them however they needed to in order to fit them through our narrow
doorways and reinstall them. There was considerable minor damage to the
contents, as the records were crushed against various edges and corners of
the drawers. Carefully arranged stacks of documents were thrown into total
disorder. My real volunteer spent a full day unscrambling the worst of the
mess, and I have a lot of work left to do there yet.

There have been a couple of positive consequences. The situation
precipitated a much-needed general inventory of all the collections, mainly
to re-document the locations of everything that got moved around. (Of
course, he wants this finished by the end of the week, which is out of the
question because of the problems he created!)I've  established a separate
file for our rarest and most valuable records, which I had intended to do
all along. It also forced me to rethink some of our basic practices, and a
number of changes for the good are coming from thast as well.

As for him, he sees absolutely nothing wrong with what he did. He believes
he was helping me and that, because he was doing what he thought was best,
it is automatically right. Rather than continue arguing fruitlessly with
him, I simply took the initiative to correct the situation as much as I
could, and so far he has had nothing to say about it.

There is hope. He finally has seen the light about why archives catalog at
higher levels than at the item level, so some badly needed changes in our
cataloging procedures are forthcoming. Never mind that he thinks the idea
originated with him; at least he understands this now.

If Dilbert worked in an archives, it couldn't be much different from this.

Best wishes,

Thomas Berry, Archivist
Historical Construction Equipment Association
16623 Liberty Hi Road
Bowling Green, Ohio 43402
Phone 419-352-5616
Fax 419-352-6086
tberry@wcnet.org
http://www.hcea.net

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