Lucy and Charlene-

Thank you both for jumping right into this! It's definitely an issue that many small museums around the country face (probably some larger ones too) and it's great to have Museum-L to work though some of these issues.

I'm glad to hear that keeping all of the donation under the one accession is the way to go, as it makes the most sense to me as the processor, and I would imagine it will be helpful to researchers. One of the exciting-yet-nerve-wracking things is that only our artifact collection has a numbering system in place (the three-part system with year.donation#.object#). Therefore, I've also got to determine a numbering system for our archival collections that integrates with the object collection (library is less of an issue).

The bulk of our archival material is from one assembled collection built over about 100 years by members of the community. Obviously, the series list for this collection is lengthy, and it would be difficult to assign each series a number on top of the collection number (it would end up having about 7 parts, which is not particularly helpful). The solution we came up with as of last night is to only list the series and sub-series in the scope & content note (eventually we will get to the container list...one day...) and to assign numbers to the series only in the finding aid. Had we more resources, we would probably spend time entering all the series into PP and giving specific numbers to the most important manuscripts. As it is, we're aiming more for an MPLP approach to processing all our collections just get to a handle on what we have.

I really like the idea of noting the objects separated from the archival material in the finding aid and pairing it with a sheet in the document cases. As much as I love PastPerfect, I know that not everyone can navigate it so easily, and tangible notes will help everyone at my institution. Location information definitely needs to be kept up-to-date this way, and I hope to strongly enforce that as part of the new collections management policy and procedures!

Thank you both for your input and advice. I really appreciate your willingness to share!

Best,
Kelsey

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