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Re: retention schedule for researcher correspondence



I passed over most of the conversation on this, but as always Dean's
thoughtful posts make me look at my own operations.  Back when I
first started here, when Ray-guns was in his first incarnation, the
archivist practised "sampling."  To me this is anathema for an
archivist, sorry, I don't care, I don't think we should be tossing stuff.
I'm not a records manager nor do I play one on TV, so I can't speak
to retention schedules.  They still do this to some extent on the paper
side of our collections and I've sometimes taken things out of the
trash rather than see them lost.

I've said probably too many times but I look at my own archival
operations as an archeologist would a site.  You don't go in and
bulldoze open the whole thing and excavate the entire site.
Archeologists sample through the site, excavating here and there,
but they leave the majority of the site for later generations of
scientists, who might have more resources, more knowledge of the
cultural context, more students, more whatever.  The point is clear to
me though: there is no weeding, nothing that should be discarded,
there is only backlog.  And some future archeologivist can decide if
it's trash, although I hope they don't!






Date sent:              Fri, 8 Dec 2000 08:40:26 -0600
Send reply to:          Archives & Archivists <ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU>
From:                   Dean DeBolt <ddebolt@MAIL.UWF.EDU>
Subject:                Re: retention schedule for researcher correspondence
To:                     ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU

> Mr. Rankin raised an interesting point in his post--the idea of
> removing a collection because you can't show that a person has
> used it in twenty years.   I know a lot of librarians who will gladly
> remove books from the shelves and discard them simply because the item has
> not been checked out.   One of the tenets in research is that a library
> should have an item when a researcher needs it. For me, I have had
> occasion to use materials in libraries that clearly showed they had not
> been checked out in twenty years....that should not be the sole criteria
> for removal.    I have a couple of "event" collections--you know, the
> records, etc. of the "Centennial Committee" --and it is surprising how
> such events will lead folks to turn to the archives and say "what did they
> do to celebrate the 100th, or 150th, etc.?"     I have the records of some
> University Departments that no longer exist and which have not been used
> in fifteen years, but guess what?   When we hit those anniversary dates, I
> always get questions like 'what happened to the aeroscience department?"
> etc.
>
> Dean
>
> Dean DeBolt
> University Librarian
> Special Collections and West Florida Archives
> John C. Pace Library
> University of West Florida
> 11000 University Parkway
> Pensacola, FL  32514-5750
> Tele:  850-474-2213;   Fax:  850-474-3338
>
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Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
295 South 1500 East
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

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      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
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Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>