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
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