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Institutional Archives



Hi,
I have been given the task of reinstituting an institutional archives program at my museum. The archive was set up in 1991, but soon fell into disarray due simply to neglect. I am left with about 100 boxes of backlogged material to process, as well as setting up a schedule for departments to deposit their materials here on a regular basis from now on (probably at the end of each year). This means that at the end of the year, I will have another mass of material to deal with.

I have two questions: how would you deal with this amount of backlogged material? If you had only 10 months or so to deal with it, what would you do? What is the quickest way to get it processed with the usual problem of a lack of time and staff? Help!!

Second is the problem of what to collect. The mission of the archives (when it was first set up) was to collect material from all departments that documented the history of the museum. I have processed a small amount of the backlogged material and have found other types of material there--material that would,under normal circumstances, be dealt with by records managers (like old health insurance enrollment forms, dept. budgets etc.). 

I would appreciate comments from other archivists who work (or have worked) in a similar institutional context on how they handled this issue. Do you keep such materials in your archives? If you do, do you keep only those records that would normally be held permanently by records managers? Or do you keep all sorts of records, setting up schedules to destroy them after varying amounts of time as a records manager would? 

The general sense that I get from my boss is that she does not want to simply exclude all records that don't speak directly to the history of this museum. The point, then, is to develop a sane collection policy that won't leave me buried under a pile of paper for the next ten years of my life.

Thanks for your help with this.


Tracy L. Brown, PhD
Assistant Archivist
Autry Museum of Western Heritage
4700 Western Heritage Way
Los Angeles, CA 90027-1462
email: tbrown@autry-museum.org
telephone: 323-667-2000 ext. 383
fax: 323-660-5721

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