On Thursday, I spent three hours in the County Jail, along with two very brave volunteers. At some point, before my employment, my institution chose to accept a donation from one of the local newspapers, which was remodeling their office space. I had been hearing about "65 file cabinets" and "digitizing project" and "you are the archivist -- tell us what we should do" for the past six months. Apparently, the County has a program for digitizing paper materials using prison labor, and the thought was that "we" could do a preservation project by digitizing the lot somehow and getting it from the image storage/retrieval system later ... then throw away the newspapers.

For months I have been trying to get into the jail in order to do some kind of assessment of the scope and condition of the collection. I had received somewhat nebulous specifics from my superiors who had been there when the donation was received. I received all kinds of pushback about actually getting in to see the collection, although I was being asked to estimate the time to digitize, costs, provide details to write a grant proposal to pay for it all, etc. The fact that we've just learned that we'll have to clear the stuff out in 2 months, instead of "at least a year" has changed the urgency some, and I got it.

I did not have an infinite amount of time, nor could I count on my volunteers to be willing to spend days locked in prison to actually inventory the newspaper editions or drawers. Our assumption was that the file cabinets were in approximately the same order that the newspaper used to research their past runs. I did not even know whether they had a numbering scheme, so we went in loaded for bear -- we brought everything we could possibly need except flashlights [that was a mistake]. I preprinted labels with unique file cabinet drawer numbers on them, and we would number using our own scheme. I also preprinted blank forms for doing a survey sample of file drawers. Data fields in the heading were: File Cabinet Number (ours), File Cabinet Number (donor's), Number of Drawers in Cabinet, Dimensions of Drawers (width x height x depth in inches), and initials of the survey person (in case I needed clarification of the writing or meaning of marks). Beneath that, the blank space was partitioned into 4 sections (should have been 5) with a heading for each section of the letters A, B, C, D, E.

Verbal instructions were given that we were going to do a random sampling of drawers in each file cabinet -- each volunteer was given a set of labels and inventory sheets, and they were to label all their cabinets, and then begin to note the size, condition, and details of each file cabinet. However, we would not be looking into every drawer, other than to verify that there were newspapers in them (if they could be opened). One drawer of each cabinet was to be inspected more thoroughly, looking at the dates, how full it was, what condition the newspaper was in, what issues they saw (apparently, we got anywhere from 19 to 30 different local issues for a given date), etc. They were not to spend more than 5 minutes to a file cabinet.

From this, I have a pretty good picture of where all the issues are, what they gave us, how much order there is, and most importantly -- how many boxes I will need and what size storage facility will be needed to get the newspapers out of the jail. We can then design a workflow for sorting and arranging the papers, filtering out the ones that we will not be imaging, and also determining whether some have already been microfilmed. Crunching the numbers is very easy, once I have some reliable data to plug in. I can now present the exec. director with some reasonable estimates like: Assuming 15 minutes to empty a full drawer, it will take 72 person-hours to box up the whole collection, presuming that we have at least 463 15"x15"x10" boxes available; There is enough space for up to eight people to work simultaneously although bathroom facilities are limited; there are 3 file cabinets that are locked or jammed and we'll need to either get some tools into the jail, or bring the file cabinets out and tear them open where we don't have to worry about sharp objects; Assuming we fill all those boxes, and that we don't want to stack them more than six high, that we'll need either a 10' x 14' storage space, or a 9' x 18' space, etc.

I really hope that, if we get nothing else out of this exercise, that my co-workers and director perhaps learn that I can give them a very nice plan if they will just let me have access to a few facts, preferably that I have gathered first hand.

Tags: awkward_archives, inventory, sampling