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In "The Pirate Problem," Dan Cohen wrote a posting framed around his surprise that the
Piratz Tavern failed to go out of business immediately after opening because there are more pirates in the Greater Washington D.C. area than he anticipated. There has been a strong pirate community in the area, and it has been here for decades with pirate feasts and gatherings. Some pirate just recognized the business potential of catering to an underserved community.

Dan characterized himself as the pirate, relative to the "old school humanities researcher" who fears that all this new digital magic mumbo-jumbo will make their comfortable way of doing research a thing of the past. I don't see Dan is the pirate here -- I think that the historian, who described himself as a crab being lowered into the pot of boiling water, is the pirate in this scenario. As archivists, as systems designers and implementors, we tend to forget about the pirates living among us (even if they wear a suit and tie and lobby on Capitol Hill by day). There are others who would like to be pirates, perhaps just for a day, but don't know how to get past the expectations of our "Very Serious Professional" community.

When we digitize, index, data warehouse, slice and dice the intellectual content of our archives, that there will always be pirates ("old school" historians) out there who will want to study the collection using the old collection/box/folder/document metaphors. The systems we build need to do more than merely retain the contextual information, but also make it available if desired by the researcher. We can do a better job of presenting the opportunities of the technology to make their work easier. The historians in the survey were asked how they would use the digitized collection. Were they presented with a laundry-list of potential tools or views into the collection and asked "would this be useful to you too?" The old-school researcher can't imagine what can be done with a digital repository because he hasn't been properly introduced. The new technology is all about choices and opportunities. Someone has to remind the historians that we are not out to cook the crabs ... we want to give them a nice comfy habitat where they can do their thing in peace. We shouldn't care whether they want to wear pirate garb or a propellor-beanie ... we just want to help them make use of our resources.

Meanwhile, back in the so-called real world, I had a researcher visit yesterday who eyeballed the stacks and said "You must have an awful lot of stuff that is digitized now, hmmm?" My response ... "Nearly nothing is digitized here. Digitization costs money, and guess what we don't have?" [sigh]

Tags: access, archives, digitization, historians, pirates, researchers

For the past few weeks, I have lost the use of about 49 square feet of the stack space in one of my repositories. They were doing load-testing of the floor above and had to shore it up in my space. So, I moved ten stacks and five pallets of unprocessed materials out of their way. I had thought that I would have to close down the Archives, since there is no other space in the building to move boxes to -- I upended the patron tables and stacked up furniture in columns to the ceiling in order to make room for the boxes. I also disassembled the ten stacks of shelves and moved them into space out side the "Zone of Doom" that I had to clear.

I discovered something in the process -- if you set aside some aesthetic considerations, there is a lot of space to be squeezed out. For starters, the pallets are not effective use of floor space. a pallet can only have boxes piled, at best, five high, and that tends to damage the boxes. They (the Divine Predecessor Archivists) could have put in another bank of shelves instead of putting down pallets for the backlog. I was able to reassemble all ten stacks outside the Zone, which means that I should be able to add at least eight stacks when I get the space back. That's 144 more c.f. of records off the floor.

The building I'm in has tall, deep window sills. In fact, the window sills make very nice shelving space. I use it primarily for material that is scheduled for deaccessioning, and backlog material (it's off the pallets on the floor), but I can store between fifteen and twenty-one boxes in each window sill. Before putting anything in there, I sealed the windows up with cardboard and masking tape. The windows have been leaking light into the Archives for years and I had plenty of cardboard from non-archival boxes that were used to transfer records into the Archives. I'll leave one window undarkened for looking outside, but using the other six will get me between 90 and 126 more c.f. of records off the floor. I can get rid of all the pallets, which are made of wood.

Finally, it is possible to arrange stacks of shelves in non-traditional configurations to get more shelving space, at the expense of a little convenience for the archives staff. The current layout ran rows of shelves in parallel the length of my stack space. Two rows have back-to-back shelves, two are against the walls, and one more is a single row because a double row would block the door. So, in my emergency configuration, I've put some stacks perpendicular to the existing rows -- at the ends of the rows, or in between. Now, the result of this is that approximately 1/3 of one stack might be blocked by the perpendicular stack. In order to access a box out of the blocked area, you would have to remove one beside it and slide the box before removing it. This would be bad for a part of the collections that are handled frequently, but certainly the backlog materials, which have been sitting on a pallet for ten years, are not bein g handled much, and I'm willing to do a little bit of extra work in return for an extra 36 c.f. of records off the floor.

Now to find some more shelves to scrounge.

Tags: archives, backlog, space

My first exposure to the "back room" of an archives was a bit of a shocker. We had agreed to continue to provide access to a local government archives that had been managed well when there was funding available, and ignored when there wasn't. Funding was never consistent, was inadequate, and in some cases, it ceased for years at a time. The archives staff turned over very frequently -- annually, and sometimes even more often, as this was not a "plum" posting or contract for the company that provided the professional services. The result of this staff/funding instability was a great deal of chaos that persisted from one year to the next. When we took over, all three processing tables, and the archivist's desk, were buried in boxes, piles of folders, papers, etc. After several months of inventorying and storing the mess, it became very apparent to me that this was not the work of one tenure of staff abandoning their work without annotation at the end of a fiscal year -- it was a collection of small messes that were left, without identification or annotation, that had accumulated over the course of many years (perhaps, since the first funding cut). New archivists came into the institution, had no information or notes about what the state of the previous unfinished projects were, and made the sensible decision to work with known materials (new accessions ... or backlog accessions that had not been partially dismembered and left strewn on the tables). They kept on going until their tenure abruptly ended.

Regardless of the decisions made that led to this scenario, there are proactive steps that can be taken by professionals who work on long-term projects and have multitasked and interrupt-driven responsibilities. This is true of archivists as much as of any other profession. In the best of circumstances, the work done in an archives is rigorous and formalized -- accessioned materials are in properly-labeled storage; a preliminary inventory is completed before any processing takes place; you have a written processing plan; etc. However, there is still the matter of the "stuff" that you're working on currently. If you are a "lone arranger" then you know what all the stuff in a particular pile is -- you put it there.

What if you don't come to work tomorrow? People get sick, often unexpectedly. People die, often unexpectedly. If everything you have to document the historical context connecting the accession/donor paperwork and the collection materials is the grey mushy stuff in your head -- you might have a problem. Actually, you probably won't have the problem. Your successors and/or your co-workers or team-mates will have the problem, if anything happens to you. I've been thinking about this for a while, and maybe there is a paper to be written here -- in the brute methodology genre, not the heavy theory area ... about documentation and policy/procedure that can help the archivist maintain that day-to-day continuity, just in case she does get run over by a Mack Truck on her way to work in the morning.

I'm probably thinking about this a bit more right now because I am recovering from a mild concussion. My brain is not quite right yet, but I think everything will go back to normal in a few weeks ... but what if I had not been so lucky? I've spent the last seven months bringing a lot of order to two archival collections (three if you count my consulting work), but a lot of the interconnections and details are still either in my head, or on one of my computers (which would defy interpretation without my head).

Tags: archives, continuity of operations, critical staff, documentation, procedures, workflow
Current Mood: groggy