Archives Hub Blog

4 Comments

1. Anna wrote:

   I’m not sure I agree with the MPLP approach. Yes, some of the processing elements such as taking out rusty pins and weeding duplicates could fall by the wayside and no one would suffer, but to me cataloguing to item level is sacrosanct. Good cataloguing is the cornerstone of resource discovery. The richer our descriptions, particularly when they are online, the more likely people are to make the trip in to see the archives themselves – which is increasingly going to be seen as a big ask as more and more is available online. We have to give them a good idea that it will be worth their while.

   Usually an archive is only catalogued once and, with so many short term contracts around, the cataloguer quite often moves on afterwards. It’s important we put everything we know about the archive into the catalogue as the archivist won’t be around to answer the detailed questions about it a year or two down the line.

   I currently work in an institutional archive which wasn’t catalogued when I arrived, although stuff was roughly organised by series. It meant we could answer straight forward questions about the institution’s history but not the more leftfield enquiries we got from some researchers whose interest in our institution was only tangential. A minimally catalogued collection will only ever be of use to people who know they want to use it (e.g. historians of the institution) whereas most archives, whenopened up with good cataloguing, contain all kinds of information that no-one would have guessed was there.

   Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 4:28 pm | Permalink
2. Kathryn wrote:

   Jane, thanks for a really interesting article and Anna thanks for alerting me to it via Twitter!
   I have to say I don’t recognise many of those points as behaviour/actions I know in any archives I’ve worked in or in any archivists I know. Maybe there was a time when priority was always given to the needs of the collection to the detriment of the needs of the users but it’s not something I recognise from my experience.

   In terms of being ‘over cautious’ in granting access to uncatalogued material, I’m not sure about this. I think we should be cautious in giving access to uncatalogued material, not least due to data protection issues. However I also think from experience that most archivists use their common sense when it comes to this and would decide whether to grant access depending on the collection and the enquiry, rather than giving a blanket rule covering all uncatalogued material.

   I would definitely agree that item level cataloguing is not always the best approach but I’ve never worked anywhere that applied one rigid ‘one cataloguing approach fits all’ to their collections. I don’t think this means a lack of standardisation, rather that it implies a flexibility and awareness of the different natures of collections, depending on how well they are organised, the types of information they contain etc. My current project involves me doing file level cataloguing of the records of a women’s teaching union (roughly 370 boxes of material). There is so much material in there that would not be obvious at a series level description as the subjects covered are far wider than the remit of the organisation. Therefore detailed file level cataloguing is done for the benefit of all users, particularly those who may not expect to find material of interest to them in the collection of a women’s teaching union.

   The point that Anna makes about short-term project work is very important too as the archivist builds up so much knowledge about one particular collection and unless this is conveyed in the catalogue this can be lost. On this point I’ve also found that project blogs can be a great channel for giving more detailed information on a collection and on my current project it has generated a great deal of enquiries about a collection which (until the project is complete) is not available on the online catalogue.

   Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 5:42 pm | Permalink
3. Laura wrote:

   I think it depends on the collection if the MPLP approach would work. I’m currently processing a collection that contains meeting information. The date of the meeting is included in the finding aid and that’s usually what the user would need to know to navigate this collection efficiently.

   However, I also processed a collection over the summer that I had records with personal information, I had to check each record to flag them so we could restricted their access.

   Archives are so unique there is no one size fits all approach and MPLP is just one of them, archivist need to make the judgement call of how they want to tackle a collection on a case by case basis.

   That said most archives have a huge backlog of documents and MPLP can help alleviate this problem especially since many archives budget’s today are being cut.

   Friday, January 6, 2012 at 4:51 am | Permalink
4. Katherine wrote:

   There could also be more onus put on the donor (public or private) to provide detailed finding aids (multi-level or otherwise) when they donate or transfer their materials to the archive. This would be another way to share the amount of work necessary to make the materials accessible post-acquisition by the archives.

   In the case of electronic records, improving the quality of creator metadata/description that is, for example, produced along with the records (digital objects) at the time of their creation, and later extracted and transferred with the digital objects, would be an enormous aid to expediting access to these records. In this case, item-level description would be “easy” to obtain through metadata extraction, and archivists (and/or the creators) could supplement this lower-level description with higher-level descriptions (e.g., series).

   Why not re-use as much metadata/description from the creators as well as improve/modify traditional archivist processing practices post-acquisition as well as encourage users to contribute description?

   Friday, January 6, 2012 at 1:31 pm | Permalink

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