It has been a couple of months since my last post and I thought I would start afresh with the first of a series of posts that will provide an explanation of the process of cataloguing a large collection of University records.<\/p>\n
Being presented with 1000 boxes of archival material and then told to go ahead and catalogue them seems like a daunting task and throws up questions such as: where to start? What is all this stuff? Where did it come from? \u00a0How does it all relate to each other? \u00a0How long is it actually going to take to catalogue it all? \u00a0Well this is the kind of stuff that archivists relish and we have a range of methods to gain intellectual and physical control over a seemingly dis-organised unlisted collection of archival material. \u00a0We don’t just pick up a box go!<\/p>\n
Any large cataloguing project must first start with a planning stage. \u00a0My first plan was to do a lot of research. \u00a0It is quite hard to plan anything past the research phase because your project plan will necessarily be guided by the outcomes of your research. \u00a0My manager: Fiona Courage, Special Collections Manager and Curator of the Mass Observation Archive (longest job title ever!) wanted to see a plan on paper, on her desk – before the week was out and so I spent an intensive first week finding out as much about the University and its archives as possible.<\/p>\n
I have fond(read stressed) memories of my first day of Fiona stacking files into my arms containing \u00a0important information about what work had been done previously on the collection. \u00a0After reading through all this paperwork I was able to gather the extent to which the collection had been\u00a0catalogued\u00a0before. \u00a0It had recently gone through another high-level re-arrangement based on the functions that the University carries out. \u00a0 This approach of archival arrangement first employed in Canada in the 1990s advocates that the functions of an\u00a0organisation\u00a0are more permanent than administrative\u00a0structures. \u00a0I quickly learned that the\u00a0administration\u00a0of the University of Sussex seems to change with startling regularity and so a functional approach to\u00a0organising\u00a0this collection seemed very sensible.<\/p>\n
My research also made it clear that pockets of the collection had been listed to item level – but there were no series level descriptions, meaning that important contextual information was missing. \u00a0I was heartened to find that the collection did have a structure – but I was less heartened to find that no consistent cataloguing processes had been used and that often what was written on a list didn’t reflect what was actually in the box. \u00a0What was also clear as well was that most of the staff in Special Collections were scared of the collection because it was so hard to find anything in it. \u00a0There was no central place where lists were kept, and if you didn’t know that the lists had been made, you wouldn’t know to look at them.<\/p>\n
I also discovered that there were a lot of different types of records in the collection – committee meeting minutes, official university videos, flyers about student protests, exam papers, official publications and many more besides. \u00a0All of these would need to be catalogued differently and slotted into the functional arrangement appropriately. \u00a0Much of the collection was unboxed or in unsuitable magazine files.<\/p>\n
All this research enabled me to put together a robust 6 month plan by the end of the week…. phew! \u00a0In my next blog post I’ll explain how my initial plan was largely dictated by the funding behind my post and how this affected what got catalogued and when. \u00a0I’ll also say a little something about how a logjam can get things wrong!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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