My time with APS is almost at a close. I’ve learned so much, but a mountain of training and knowledge remains in front of me. The two articles I’ll be discussing today I’ve read a few times over the week in preparation to collect my thoughts for this blog post. The abstracts they use at the beginning as helpful, but as someone new to the field I found myself taking notes on the terms that were being used such as MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging). Thankfully, the terms are explained in the text. The two articles I selected focus on access, and the archivist’s role in this.
Christopher J. Prom’s article, “Optimum Access? Processing in College and University Archives” is in conversation with the article from Greene and Meissner, “More Products, Less Process”. Prom says this should be required reading for every college or university archivist, and this article uses the Greene and Meissner article as a base and further develops questions that were left unanswered in regard to processing, arrangement, and description. The article is a study of how small, medium, and large repositories process, arrange, and describe collections and ultimately how much of their collection remains on backlog through these actions and how access is hindered in these processes. Prom concludes on four notes, that arrangement and description audits could help archivists and institutions respond to each situation based on staff size and skill to critique their standards and techniques are being applied. Secondly, archivists establish a reasonable amount of time to dedicate to a project and spend just that amount of time on it, as Prom says, “processing and describing to the clock” (23). Third, there should be a strategy that can be conducted by small teams, or a single person so that smaller organizations can move through their backlogs in a similar regard to larger organizations. Lastly, Prom states that the archival community should establish workflows and tools that should be tailored to the demand for efficient processing and description. Prom’s article was first published in 2008, and the landscape of online sources has changed since then, but there is still a wealth of information to be learned from this study.
Donald C. Force and Randy Smith’s article, “Context Lost: Digital Surrogates, Their Physical Counterparts, and the Metadata that is Keeping Them Apart” gripped me with just its name. Metadata is fascinating to me, it can both illuminate and cast shadows upon an object. The article highlights three reasons why archivists are digitizing archival materials, “first, to provide access to specific materials; second, to increase exposure to the archival institution and its holdings; and third, to prolong the original object materials through reduced usage.” This article is a study on metadata and the digitization of archival objects. The most fascinating thing to me was their argument about how archivists are unaware of how researchers will use the material, but how archivists lack the metadata knowledge to meet the needs of researchers. Digital objects can lose context as well, depending on how the person accesses the materials such as finding it through a search engine. The process of digitizing archival collections is essential, but this is still more to be done to create further access through metadata and to meet the needs of the community.
During my time with APS, I’ve read through their workflow documents and heard that term mentioned at least once a week. This is something Prom discusses, so it was interesting for me to see this connection. Prom mentions a standardizing of practice, and that even within institutions the process can differ. Using this, and drawing on the second article, I’m reminded of how APS’ digital library and the Rev City project are using metadata differently. The Rev City project has created new fields such as “lived experience” and is adding more metadata to archival materials that already existed on the APS library page. Sabrina did an interesting experiment with the stakeholders of the project where in which she asked them to read four documents and make metadata that they thought would be meaningful to someone trying to access the document. The metadata differing between people, and the things an archivist could miss or exclude for potentially a myriad of reasons or shortcomings is fascinating to me. For example, I’m currently transcribing a book of loyalist letters and one of the girl’s references toile. I know this as material culture, but it was spelled incorrectly and I was uncertain as to what it was. Bethany pointed out to me it was spelled wrong and what it was, but this is an example of something that could be missed by an archivist. I know APS is trying a new system of processing a collection that I’ve referenced before, and it’s moving quickly. The Prom article discusses how organizations create finding aids, or other inventory notes. The collection they’re doing it on already has a robust inventory listing with minor descriptions, which is allowing them to focus on digitization and metadata to make the materials able to be accessed sooner.