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Re: The Miscellaneous Box!



>
> Nancy,
> As anyone who knows me will tell you--it's a pet peeve.  I'll call it
> anything else--unidenfied, ephemera, etc.  but it's something--reports,
> correspondence, notes, telephone messages from your mother--what have
> you--that at least will tell the researcher something which miscellaneous
> won't!  And if you don't know what it is or how it relates to the
> collection, should it be there?
>
I don't know, I've always thought of the miscellaneous category as
the processor's friend.  When you get down to the end of the
collection and are sick of it and have already realized that hey!, you
don't even like these people very much, those last few items that just
defy categorization can be dumped into a box labeled
"Miscellaneous" and allowed to sink into the obscurity they so richly
deserve.  It's either that or a box label like "Greeting Cards From
Family Members / Receipts from Dry Cleaners / Dog License
papers / 4th Grade class letters."  Or I guess you could throw it all
away, eh?  My pet peeve is "sampling" of collections, the processor
making a subjective judgement that this or that isn't important and
tossing it.  That completely violates the Archival Imperative, which to
me is "Bring it all back alive."  Despite all of our training and
experience and certification, we are neither mind readers, who can
look into the future and see what researchers will want, nor time
travelers, who can go back and ask the person who collected it
whether we should keep it or not.  If I wanted to have the power to
weed and toss at will, I'd be a librarian, not an archivist.

Roy "Getting a little testy with all this O-lympic spirit floating around"
Webb



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

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