jenett | (Reply)

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Heh. Quite often it starts with somebody telling us about someone or some organisation that has papers of historical interest. And then maybe, after a certain amount of toing and froing, I, or one of my colleagues, will go and look at these things in situ and decide whether they are of Real Historical Value or not (you would not believe the years of rubbish some organisations retain). Then, if they are of RHV, we talk about terms of transfer (this stage can go on and on, sometimes for years, while the person or organisation works through their separation issues). Eventually, we box the stuff up and move it to our stacks. In due course, a member of the team will do the detailed processing work of researching the person or organisation, sorting, arranging, packaging the material in archival quality containers (lately I have been putting 1000s of photos into melinex sleeves), and describing it according to our standard cataloguing protocols in our dedicated cataloguing software. This is a process that it is very hard to give a timescale for, because you never know, until you do this detailed work, what you're going to find. Sometimes what looks like a lovely series of clearly labelled files, e.g., turns out to be clearly labelled files that were repurposed for something else entirely... and not relabelled. At the end of this process you have a beautifully boxed up collection with all the produceable units given references by which they can be ordered, a lovely online catalogue whereby researchers can find out what's in the collection and also order whatever they're interested in via our online ordering system. At this point, the archivist probably writes a post for the library blog to say what a nifty collection is now available to the public, mentioning any particularly choice things they came across.