Becca,
The first thing I would do is to take a good hard look at the records and make sure they fit your mission statement and scope of collections statement. If not, then problem solved - they get sent elsewhere and removed from your files.
If they DO fit in your collection, for now (and only for now) I would:
Document, Document, Document
1) Make a note in the Collection's Accession record of what happened, who was involved, and how you are going to permanently resolve it
2) Make a note at the Container Level in the Collection's Catalog record of what happened, who was involved, and how you are going to permanently resolve it.
3) List ALL of those 6 boxes/entire Collection as being the location for each of the names (I am assuming here that you can filter to just these school record names by collection or some such).
I would also cross-reference and add a note in your permanent paper accession files what was happened, who was involved, and how you are going to permanently resolve it.
Ideas on Resolving:
1) Is the person who originally did this still around, are they willing, and do you trust them to come in and fix? (They might have notes, etc that you do not...)
2) If you are small enough to keep on it, I would write a note somewhere near your PP workspace AND in each of the 6 boxes reminding people to update PP every time they use those specific boxes. Eventually it will be complete.
3) If you aren't small enough to keep an eye on it, this will make a good internship or long-term/computer-savvy volunteer project. It has the benefit of teaching someone pretty thoroughly in PP, archival organizing/levels/structure, AND keeps you from doing some awfully tedious data entry. (If you have someone else do this, make sure you do a couple of examples from the collection so you know what they will be up against and to make sure you get the data entered the way you want it - I've had way too many interns/volunteers think cutting corners or winging it was more acceptable than asking a question.)
Let me know how it turns out!
Respectfully,
Terri L. Bedore
Independent Museum Consultant
(formerly Director/Curator, USAF Security Forces Museum)
231-715-1759 mobile
On Oct 16, 2013, at 3:43 PM, Becca Hiller wrote:
Wise ones,
We use PastPerfect for all of our collections, including archives and we have run into an issue that we are not sure how to resolve. Our situation is this . . . we have a collection of school records that is comprised of 6 boxes. A previous archivist diligently recorded every name mentioned into the People Box in PastPerfect. However, nowhere does it say in what box-- or what book in a box--or on which page, in a book, in a box that person can be found.
We tossed around several fixes to this but didn’t like any of them. So we are hoping some of you, who use PastPerfect for archival records, can tell us how you resolve an issue like this when you have large collections with LOTS of names in multiple places.
Thank you in advance,
Becca Hiller
Education Director/Archivist
Santa Fe Trail Center Museum & Research Library
(620)285-2054
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