Processing Practices

There are varying degrees of processing, ranging from the work that could be done in an optimal situation to the standard amount of work necessary to make a collection accessible. Most processing work tends to be a compromise between the two, and each repository will need to evaluate and understand what it determines to be the most appropriate amount of work its staff should perform to make all collections both discoverable and usable to its users.

 

Effective management of a processing program will aid in the use of efficient processing practices. Individual archivists, paraprofessionals, and student workers should have a good idea of the options available to them in terms of processing levels and the practices and expectations therein. Shared attitudes and outlooks on the part of managers, archivists, and other archival staff members is important to make an efficient processing program work. Transparency and communication within a repository will greatly facilitate some of the practices outlined below - curator or donor-created collection descriptions or box and file lists can be repurposed by archivists, for example.

 

The following general approaches are intended to be format-agnostic, and apply to all collections or portions of collections. More specific workflows for photographs, printed materials, audiovisual materials, artifacts, and born digital content can be found in the various local processing manuals shared in the processing toolkit.

 

Overall Approaches

 
  • A repository’s first priority should be to gain collection level control over all its holdings. Detailed processing work should wait until all holdings are minimally accessible.

  • There is not a "one size fits all" standard for arrangement, description, or preservation across all collections or even within collections. The amount of work required to achieve the golden minimum can vary from collection to collection, or series to series.

  • An archival processor should weigh how much description, organization, or preservation is truly necessary and then flexibly apply the most appropriate arrangement, description, or preservation techniques. One should ask "What are the costs?" and "What are the benefits?" for almost every processing action, and then find the most efficient way to achieve sufficient intellectual and physical control over the materials.

  • Always look for the “golden minimum”. For each collection, perform the minimum amount of work necessary to make a collection usable. Any work beyond the minimum should be justified, e.g., for research value or other repository requirements.

  • Use archival appraisal at every step of collection lifecycle.

 

Practices for Intellectual and Physical Arrangement

 
  • Intellectual arrangement should reflect context and function, and enable users to understand and navigate the finding aid.

  • Minimize physical arrangement or re-arrangement of files. Look for “good enough” organization or an even more efficient approach is to leave the folders in their original order.

  • Physical arrangement need not match intellectual arrangement; i.e., it is not necessary to bring all the folders that are part of a series together physically; the finding aid can be used to intellectually bring together related material stored in different containers.

  • Resist the impulse to handle material at the item level, particularly when it comes to arranging items within a folder or removing items from folders and placing them in other folders.

 

Practices for mitigating risk/working with restricted materials

 
  • Assess risk to determine the appropriate level of review for restricted materials.

  • Proactively work with donors to identify restricted materials to reduce intake of problematic materials.

  • If a large number of materials in a collection are restricted, consider postponing processing the collection until a majority of collection materials are open for research.

  • Balance ethics of access with the ethics of protecting information with legal, institutional, or donor-imposed restrictions.

 

Practices to increase access

 
  • Develop or revise reading room policies to account for use of unprocessed or efficiently processed material. Additionally, tracking use of collections will determine if collections are in high demand, if the level of description is not adequate for user needs, or if the materials are found to be at risk.

 

Physical handling and preservation practices

  • Reuse existing folders as much as possible.  

  • Avoid removing fasteners, unless clearly warranted by presence of rust.

  • Approach preservation issues with holistic risk-assessment. For example, while newsprint and other acidic papers may damage other paper, storing the entire collection in a climate-controlled facility will mitigate this risk. Time spent on preservation photocopying could instead be spent on descriptive work.

 

Descriptive practices

 
  • The level of description can vary within the collection. Some portions of a collection may warrant more detailed description, while others may not.

  • Repurpose existing description when possible. If there are existing box lists, inventories, etc. that are serviceable and can be made available in electronic form, consider linking collection-level descriptions to those inventories.

  • Not every collection requires extensive historical/biographical notes. Write brief historical/biographical and scope and content notes where appropriate. Don’t restate formats in the scope notes if already listed in a title. If extensive bibliographies of individuals or organizational histories already exist, refer to them, don’t duplicate them.

  • Historical/biographical notes should give a brief history of the person or organization who is the creator of the collection, and in particular, highlight the creator’s historical connection to the items in the collection.  In addition to the front matter of a finding aid, these notes can also be employed as warranted at the series, subseries, or folder level to give context to frequent correspondents or other prominent figures or organizations in the collection.  The creator’s most known accomplishments or titles or the part of their history that relates to the items at hand should be emphasized.    

  • Use scope and content notes strategically. Consider describing collections in aggregate via a more extensive scope and content note over listing individual folder titles. Provide enough detailed information to help users determine that a collection is appropriate to their research needs.

  • In addition to delivering a basic summary of the various formats in collections, scope and content notes can also provide rich, content description of the records, detailing the activities or functions that they illustrate and possible larger historical trends.  Employing subject keywords that researchers may use to search for the collection in the scope and content note can make the collection more discoverable by online catalogs and search engines.        

 

More thoughts on descriptive notes

Describing material in aggregate is often difficult, and requires training and practice in archival theory. This intellectual work is where a professionally trained archivist can shine. Analysis of a set of materials, how they were produced, and what kinds of research they might support, is at the core of an archivist’s work.

 

Creating effective scope and content notes supports efficient processing practices by potentially allowing for the material to be described in less detail at the file level.  All Harvard processing manuals attached in the processing toolkit provide guidance on what makes an effective scope note, but we have also reproduced some of that guidance here:

The scope and content may include information about any or all of the following, as appropriate:

  • Functions, activities, transactions, and processes that generated the materials being described

  • Documentary forms or intellectual characteristics of the material being described

  • The content dates, that is, the time period covered by the intellectual content of the material being described

  • Geographic areas to which the material pertains

  • Subject matter of the material, such as activities, events, people, and organizations

  • Any other information that assists the user in evaluating the relevance of the materials, such as completeness, changes in location, ownership and custody while still in the possession of the creator, etc.

 

The following are examples of effective scope and content notes in Harvard finding aids:

 

The Ferrari Hardoy Archive

 

Marie C. McCormick papers

 

Harvard Commons records

 

Correspondence and faculty reports by John Farrar, Harvard professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy

 

Samuel Shapleigh papers (note in particular Series II)

 

Stanley S. Surrey papers

 

Kristen R. Yount papers

 

The following are examples of effective biographical, historical, or administrative history notes in Harvard finding aids:

 

The Alison and Peter Smithson Archive

 

Erich Lindemann papers

Harvard School of Public Health Longitudinal Studies of Child Health and Development records

Boston Women's Fund records