At Baker Library Special Collections (BLSC) we are using the Principles (https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/jointprocessingguidelines/principles ) as the foundation for creating a high-level implementation plan. This in turn will drive the creation of multi-year roadmaps detailing the more specific activities that are necessary to achieve our overall goals.
As a first step it was important for our team to understand and articulate, at a relatively high level, the meaning of each principle for our repository. As an example, Principle 1, “strive to make all collections, even those that are unprocessed, open for research,” means:
- Creating and publishing resource records in ArchivesSpace for collections that have a word document, typescript, or PDF as its finding aid;
- Addressing our backlog of collections not currently available for research;
- Creating inventories for all of our accessioned collections and determining if some of those which are free from donor or institutional restrictions can be made available to researchers without being fully processed; and lastly
- Having clear and standardized language in public-facing descriptions about access.
This exercise was repeated for the remaining five principles.
The next step in the process was to identify where we were making progress on each of the Principles, where there were gaps, and determine the timeframe for addressing the gaps (knowing that we can’t address everything in one year!). For example, to address the first bullet point for Principle 1, a 4-year project plan was developed in mid-2017 outlining our approach to enhancing access to business manuscript collections via MARC records and/or finding aids that have some representation of easily convertible data (or as we call it our “finding aid retrospective” project). During FY18, the processing team executed this plan and to date have created and published over 150 new resource records in ArchivesSpace. This step was repeated for each of the Principles (and sub-bullets) so in the end we felt had a clearer understanding of what we wanted to address and achieve over the next few years.
We are now in the process of developing our roadmap for the new fiscal year which will begin July 1st. It is likely that we’ll refine this process as we move forward, but at a minimum the team feels we have a better idea of what the Joint Processing Guidelines are and what we need to do to fully implement them at Baker Library Special Collections.
Mary Samouelian, Manager, Archival Processing