Greg-
Basically, there has only been a museum professional in the museum for about 4 years, the museum is only about 10 years old, and the town committee in charge of managing materials from community members who wanted to donate their items to "the archive" in town is about 100 years old. We have some distinctive archival collections donated by specific members of the community that have been properly accessioned since a professional began working at the museum, but 90% of our archival material was amassed over 100 years by the community as a whole with no discernible provenance.
I started working here about 6 months ago, and when I asked where/what the archives were, I was directed to a large filing cabinet with hundreds of newspaper clippings, pamphlets, letters, and ephemera that had been organized by someone (a volunteer with the museum?) into folders and placed in loosely alphabetical order. We've decided that this collection of material represents a single arranged collection that was created by the entity that would become the current museum. There are series within this collection that organize the material by subject (specific people, business information, committee meeting minutes, and the like). This collection does not, as far as we know, relate directly to donated object collections, so there is no need (or, in fact, way) to tie the material in this collection to any artifacts.
However, judging by the donations I have seen in the past year, we will continue to receive donations with mixed object/archival materials that must be properly accessioned, arranged, and described while still representing one complete collection. Of course the issue then becomes one of numbering. Materials part of the large arranged collection are easily kept separate from the object collection, but then...how to number the mixed collections we receive from here on out so that the number integrates with both the archives and object portions of the collection. Since we want to make it easy for PP to show entries in numerical order, we have to be careful how many digits we use and in which places.
I think your suggestion to use the traditional Mss prefix makes sense. Since we aren't, of course, numbering individual items in the archives, the numbers shouldn't become too ungainly. It definitely makes it easier to identify which items are in the object collection and which are in the archives. It does require (depending on the search terms used) the researcher to look under 2014.01 and Mss.2014.01 in the search results, but that doesn't seem all that unusual.
Thank you for your response!
Kelsey
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