The historical society I work for hadn’t had a fulltime archivist before me, and collections were minimally processed if at all before going into storage. We recently moved into a building that allowed us to unpack and fully address and organize collections, so your e-mail rings a variety bells for me.

You may want to see if there are particular collections that would be of interest to the general public or whoever your mission addresses.  If inquiry or reference requests have been saved, you may look at those to get an idea of what sort of things would be good to prioritize.  If they are concise collections (generally physically together, manageable in size), you could try getting interns or recent library/archives grads to handle those pieces.  

At our historical society, we have many donor files in hard copy but not in our database, and there wasn’t a consistent labeling process to identify items amongst the collections.  So we took the physical files and organized them into our database first, and then worked to reconcile items as we found them during processing.  This is still happening, it’s a long process, so my chief words of advice would be to not allow yourself to get overwhelmed.  Break down the tasks as much as you need, in chunks.  I hope your employers appreciate the magnitude (and benefits!) of this work.

Sincerely,

Astrid M. Drew

Steamship Historical Society

2500 Post Road

Warwick, RI

02886

www.sshsa.org

401-463-3570

*Apologies for cross posting.*

Hello,

                I’m recently started in a new position at a new institution managing their collection. My predecessor, while a very nice person, fell far behind on management of the collection. I’m seeing about seven years of buildup. Everything needs to be rehoused/needs proper storage, virtually every database record updated with correct locations and information, hundreds or thousands of records entered into the database that are typed out in a Word file but not entered into the database, paperwork and documentation located and updated, as well as rearranging objects in storage areas. The archives collection is in a bit better condition so this will only focus on the Museum’s mixed physical collection consisting of the usual human created items, natural history items, photographs, etc. My guess is there is somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 collection items to be dealt with.

                As I’m making a plan to tackle this massive project I’d be very interested in hearing from anyone else that has gone through this or a similar process. I’m tossing around ideas as I sort through things and of course it all depends on available funds, but I’m thinking the only way to go is physically shelf by shelf, one by one, try to locate a database or Word record, update as necessary and rehouse as necessary, rearrange where possible then move on. This is obviously going to be a huge amount of work so hopefully I’ll come across some funding to get some recent grads but any success’ and pitfalls others care to share would be much appreciated. Thank you.

William Shepherd

Collections Officer

Swift Current Museum

44 Robert Street West

Swift Current, Saskatchewan

S9H 4M9

Phone: 306-778-4815

Fax: 306-778-4818

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