Something New For Something Old (part 2)
December 6th, 2008 by MerrileeContinuing with the first day of the conference and onto the processing panel.
Jodi Allison-Bunnell gave an overview (by telephone!) of the Northwest Digital Archives processing initiative [pdf]. This used distributed staff to do processing (something I think some institutions should consider doing in real life, not just in grants). Jodi talked about the advantages of this approach — easier to get funding for processing if it’s part of a collaborative project (many funders will not generally fund processing); good professional development opportunity for those involved (who learned MPLP practices and were made to work others from different institutions); reduced overhead (from the grant administration perspective); distribution of employees who have language skills or skills to work with specialized materials.
Kelley Bachli talked about the Center for Primary Research and Training at UCLA which brings graduate students in to work with archival collections (the project is funded by soft funds lead by the Ahmanson Foundation, and UCLA is working towards creating an endowment). Students are working through materials in the backlog, which includes books and bound materials. Kelley gave several examples of where students and their interests and talents have been effectively matched with collections. (Unfortunately, although the students are chipping away at the backlog, UCLA has not put measures like MPLP into place to limit the future growth of the backlog).
Jacqueline Goldsby gave an overview of Mapping the Stacks, a project based at the University of Chicago. This project is similar to the UCLA project in that it brings graduate students in to process collections, but is very different because it has a strong faculty component (Jacqueline is a professor in the English department at the University of Chicago). Additionally, the students are paired with collections all around Chicago’s south side. Finally, the project has a subject orientation towards “unhiding” collections that document Black Chicago. This project had a lot of really great aspects to it. Several of the students have been with the project for many years, the UofC special collections and digital library staff work with students and also with partner repositories to make it clear that this is a project about “access, not ownership.”
Finally, Christine Weideman talked about implementing More Product Less Process at Yale Manuscripts and Archives. What I really like about Chris’s approach is that she backs the process all the way up to include donors, and gets them on board with the type of processing that will be done for each collection, and that she also gets them involved with preparing the collection to be accessioned. Unlike other presenters at the conference, Chris is skeptical about the idea of coming back and doing more description later. A’int gonna happen, particularly with new important collections coming in the door and with pressure for digitization. Chris called for interactive finding aids — she envisions a finding aid that will allow easy addition of comments from reference archivists, donors, researchers, exhibit curators, etc. The “description” remains core, but other descriptive elements can be reflected as well.
The first day concluded with a rousing discussion. We started out with More Product, Less Process implementation and it’s impact on reference and users. Mark Greene said that there has not been as much pushback as it initially seemed and referenced a survey of the Reference, Access, and Outreach Section in SAA (I think it’s this one, done this year).
I continue to be amazed that so many people react as if they think that MPLP is a monolithic recommendation, rather than a set of recommendations that can be applied as needed and appropriate.
The other strand of the conversation was around how to connect with collections with communities of interest. Flickr was held up as a not-very-good model for this. I think Flickr can be thought of as tool for bringing together materials for a community, as well as discovery environment. Some collections have natural communities, others, not so much. It all depends.
I’ll continue with the second day in another post.
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