I spent last year traveling the state working with small museums and
organizations on archival projects.  Many of these institutions used
PastPerfect and I had an opportunity to try it out in a variety of
situations.  Here are some of my conclusions (note: I have not yet had a
chance to work with the new 3.0 version and some problems may have been
worked out):

1.  No matter what they say, this program was written by curators not
archivists.  Overall the program is great--easy to use and flexible, but the
archives section seems to me to be the weakest.  For overall collection
management, I would still recommend it and hope that future versions become
more archivally friendly.

2.  You can create finding aids from the program.  The program itself will
print out a "finding aid", although it looks more like a cataloguing
worksheet than the narrative styled finding aid we're used to.  I've also
had success using the mail merge function in the reports section to create a
more standard finding aid (this requires careful entry of descriptive
information in the fields) as well as completing NUCMC forms.  To do this, I
had to redefine some of the fields.  We also elected to skip the box/folder
entry and add this to the finding aid in the wordprocessing program--the
PastPerfect section was simply too clunky and time consuming for collections
larger than 1-2 manuscript boxes.

3.  Numbering for archival collections is totally different from objects.
For example, one archival collection could be made up of several different
accessions (same donor over time) and one accession might contain several
collections (the donor was caretaker for the records of several clubs, ie.).
The standard trinomial simply has less meaning for archives.  This results
in serious problems in PastPerfect which wants accessions to equal
collections.  The alternate used by many archives is to assign a second
number based on the collection (manuscript collection 1 becomes mc1, etc.)
This allows for a variety of accretions (accessions) but I've never
understood why we need a number if we have a unique collection title--it's
just one more thing to remember and makes no sense to patrons.  At one time
shelving by mc number was a useful locating tool but over time this falls
apart as collections grow and have to be moved (or risk constantly shifting
everything down the shelves).

4.  Remember in archives that intellectual control and physical control are
two different things.

5.  The whole idea behind archival arrangement is to avoid item level
description.  The only time I've ever done this (created a collection
"calendar") was for the papers of a well known writer who had letters from
other prominent authors.  Few collections merit the time necessary to do
this.  If your series and/or folders are well titled this should be enough
to point the researcher to right box and folder.  They can flip through a
folder or two to find a specific item (looking for a 1932 receipt? check out
folder "Receipts, 1930-1934").  Even the one or two special items do not
need a separate catalogue record--just mention them in your scope and
content note or series description.

6.  The hierarchy links in PastPerfect are imperfect.  If you search the
archives section and it's described in the fond, series, and item records
you get three hits, with no indication until you click for more detail as to
what description level your looking at.  In most cases, we decided to only
enter collection level records in PastPerfect (which is pretty much what
you'd do if cataloguing in a library setting, for NUCMC, or any other MARC
record).  This gets the researcher to the right collection, then they can
use the finding aid to narrow the search.

I could go on for a while but this is getting long and is probably not
relevant to most of the list.  If you have specific questions, feel free to
contact me off-list.

Anne L. Foster, CA (certified archivist)
Director
Huntley Project Museum of Irrigated Agriculture
P O Box 353
Huntley MT 59037
phone: (406) 348-2533
fax: (406) 348-2534
email: [log in to unmask]

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