1. Putting Access Before Perfection:
The Ripple Effects of Backlog Management in
Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University
Christine Weideman, Carrie S. Beinecke Director of Manuscripts and Archives
William Landis, Head of Arrangement and Description, Manuscripts and Archives
Friday, 14 November 2008
NELINET Bibliographic Services Conference:
Revealing Hidden Collections: Making the Lost Found Again
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts

2. Institutionalizing MPLP
• Doing more assertive up-front work with donors
• Defining and documenting basic processing
approaches to four key areas that inadvertently steer
archivists to item-level processing:
Rearranging | De-duplicating | Privacy issues | Preservation
• Making processing decisions at the point of
accessioning, and documenting them
• Using data content standards to create more robust
descriptions of what we have/have not done to a
collection

3. Documenting ‘Basic’ Processing I
• Options for work within boxes
– None (inventory as received)
• Good enough if folder labels are meaningful and condition is
acceptable
– Folder rearrangement only
• When received folder order is confusing and obstructs use, or
when significant portions of the collection/accession are
unfoldered or poorly housed upon receipt
– Work within folders
• Only when funds come with collection or when use warrants it

4. Documenting ‘Basic’ Processing II
• Options for deduplication
– Don’t do it
• Only remove duplicates if they exist in egregious
enough quantities to be noticed during cursory
accessioning review of collection
– Do it
• When funds for processing come with collection
• When users call duplicates out as a problem in the
reading room

5. Documenting ‘Basic’ Processing III
• Options for dealing with privacy issues (student
records, health records, legal records, donor
restrictions, etc.)
– Cursory review
• With input from donor
• Logical areas within some collections where existence of these
materials seems most likely
– In-depth review
• When cursory review reveals many such records (consider closing
portion of collection for a time rather than item-level review)
• When use bring privacy issues to the attention of Public Services
staff (researchers, duplication orders, etc.)

6. Documenting ‘Basic’ Processing IV
• Options for preservation work on collection materials
– Basic
• All material housed appropriately for transport to storage facility
and servicing in reading room
• Replace obviously deteriorating containers, primarily folders
• Remove obviously rusty fasteners
• Identify obvious water damage/mold issues
– Advanced
• Preservation issues immediately endangering collection materials
raised and addressed
• Need for any item-level conservation work identified and
documented for future reference

7. The Ideal for Which We Strive
85% of newly accessioned materials 15% of newly accessioned materials
dealt with using ‘Basic’ strategies require something beyond ‘Basic’

8. Decision-making about Processing
• Make and document decisions at point of
accessioning

12. Decision-making about Processing
• Make and document decisions at point of accessioning
• Collaboration IS required: involve whoever is necessary
to make necessary decisions for specific accessions
– Processing staff
– Collection development staff
– Director
– Electronic records expert

13. Using Standards
• Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS), Chicago:
Society of American Archivists, 2004
• Defines 26 elements commonly used in describing
archival materials
• For use in U.S., but keyed to international archival
standards
• Focus is on descriptions of aggregations, provenance-
based or intentionally assembled

14. Using Standards
• We can use the descriptive elements defined in
DACS more assertively to better communicate
in our descriptions what has and has not done to
a collection
• If we really mean that we will revisit minimal
processing a collection is heavily used and end
users feel the processing decision impedes use,
we need to tell them so

15. Examples: DACS 5.1 Custodial History
Element
The donor obtained the collection from the East Idyllwild
Historical Society when it was disbanded in 1975.
Volunteers from that institution retrieved the collection
from the loading dock of the Bountiful County
Archives in 1967 after it was deaccessioned. During the
deaccessioning process, all material from 1862-1865,
and possibly other years, was destroyed prior to
acquisition of the collection by the East Idyllwild
Historical Society. In addition, it is unclear whether or
not selected items were removed by previous owners.

16. Examples: DACS 5.3 Appraisal, Destruction,
and Scheduling Information Element
The collection originally included four linear feet of
financial information, primarily checkbook stubs and
monthly bank statements. During processing, because
repository policy calls for retention only of summary
financial information, the annual account statement for
each year was retained and others discarded. Also,
checkbook stubs were sampled, with one random book
of stubs retained for every five years.

17. Examples: DACS 7.1 Notes Element (for a
Processing Note)
This collection received a basic level of processing within a year
after it was received by Your Name Here Special Collections.
This included rehousing in archival boxes and minimal
organization. Except in extreme cases, collection materials were
not refoldered. Descriptive information is drawn in large part
from information supplied with the collection and from an initial
survey of the contents. Folder titles appearing in the Inventory
section of the finding aid are often based on those provided by
the creator or previous custodian. Titles have not been verified
against the contents of the folders in all cases. When folder labels
contained no or too little information, processing staff supplied
titles based on a cursory examination of folder contents and
appropriate national content standards. Additional processing
may be done in the future if usage of the collection suggests that
would be appropriate.

18. Using Archival Approaches to Managing
Publications and Printed Ephemera
• Experiments at Yale, both in Manuscripts and Archives and in
the broader Library
• Many intentionally assembled (by the library or archival
repository) collections of printed materials are as valuably
accessed by author (e.g., Yale unit that generated them) or by
topic (e.g., Theodore Dwight Wolsey, President of Yale from
1846-1871; New Haven and Northampton Railroad) than by
detailed bibliographic cataloging
– Archival approaches to managing such materials may be cheaper,
especially when the backlog is huge (250,000 uncataloged pamphlets in
Yale’s Mudd Library)

27. USMARC 856

29. 099
710
245 $a
245 $f
245 $g
300
546
520

31. Enhanced
information
about
collection
contents
now
picked up
by commercial
search
engines
610s and 710s
650
655s

32. What We’ll End Up With
• Completely enhanced MARC record in our OPAC with
~20 fields rather than 2
• Enhanced with an 856 link to a finding aid for the
collection in our Yale Finding Aid Database
– This could also be a link to a static HTML rendition of the
finding aid if no finding aid system available
• Finding aid with more granular information about
collection contents that is crawlable by commercial
search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.

33. http://www.archiviststoolkit.org

34. http://www.archiviststoolkit.org

35. EAD & MARCXML Outputs
HTML Output

36. Thanks!
Questions?
» christine.weideman@yale.edu
» bill.landis@yale.edu