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LSW:
kelly
Okay collective mind. Say you're a newly minted librarian in a very small academic library and your library director wants you to head up the creation of a local history archive/collection from boxes and boxes of completely unorganized photographs amassed over the past 50 or so years. What's your first step? (Don't say quit.)
June 22, 2012
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Yvonne and bevedog liked this
1. Try to organize boxes into broad categories?
- ωαřмaiden ❤Marrit Woman❤
1. Try to determine if the boxes are each already organized somehow (as in: each box is from a single source, or the boxes themselves can be roughly chronologically arranged)
- DJF
Find a mentor. Our archivist has made himself available to a colleague in a similar situation in the next town over, and it helps even if it's moral support but also can help your director understand what is and isn't possible.
- barbara fister
1. Do an inventory. It doesn't have to be exhaustive, just enough to give you an idea of what you have. Make note of formats, because you'll need that info for preservation. 2. While doing this, you might notice an organization that wasn't apparent. 3. Pull out any documentation that can help you identify people/places/events in the images. 3. Now you're ready to identify or create series/categories.
- Anne Graham
Also, look for documentation about where these things came from. Not necessarily in the collection itself. Check with staff to see if they remember how the items arrived, probably in several acquisitions. Even an oral history is something to start with.
- Anne Graham
Start lobbying to be assigned student help. By the time you actually get it, you may have taken enough of the above steps to be able to take advantage of it.
- RepoRat
The advice above all looks great to me, and is the kind of thing that we learned/did in the archives class I took in library school. If you didn't take such a class, it's important to know that archivists have their own professional practices that differ from librarians'. The Society of American Archivists may have information that could help : http://www2.archivists.org/ I see in the sidebar a link to a directory of archival consultants, which might help in following Barbara's advice.
- bevedog
Thanks everyone! I am now only whelmed. I'm definitely going to look into finding a local archivist willing to help. Luckily there is no rush on this project so I'm happy to be able to go at my own pace.
- kelly