Category: Processing

8 mm film, 8 track tapes, 8 inch floppy disks, all once promising media storage formats are for the most part gone from our daily use and even popular memory. Replaced by modern day equivalents of WAV files, MP3s, and cloud computing, our common media storage and delivery has moved from the tangible to intangible.

What is an archivist to do?

The time has come where archives and libraries are better equipped and staffed to manage the latter rather than the former. Maintaining AV rooms filled with half-working equipment for playback is a no win situation. Institutional repositories and internet based applications are better able to store, playback and preserve digitally created information than ever before.

A recent discovery of a box full of 8 inch floppies all marked as correspondence from the office of the Vice President for Health Sciences demonstrates the conundrum in the collection of historical documents. On the one hand, the content of the disks are absolutely central to the collecting focus for the History Project, yet on the other, the media is so obsolete and likely degraded to the point of being unable to retrieve any information.

The 8 inch floppy, like its successors the 5 in., 3.5in., Jaz and Zip disks, were tied to specific hardware operating systems. Yet, it often had multiple formats, disk densities, transfer rates, and spinning heads that made them even in their prime incompatible with other 8 inch disk drives. The ability to rescue data off any 8 inch diskette today would be beyond most IT skill sets and, due to the low data capacity they actually held, not worth the expense.

1980s computing taught us in the 1990s to fear the question of "how will I be able to save, read, open, edit this after the media, format, software, hardware changes?" However, in the last ten years the migration of electronic records has become easier to understand and to accomplish with only minor cautionary steps.

Changes in storage media will always challenge our preservation techniques and cause a few gaps in recorded history. This is to be expected and for the most part accepted as progress to better record keeping. I'm sure the first few recipes for baked clay tablets didn't quite turn out as expected, yet I've never heard anyone mention cuneiform tablets as an unstable media.

So with this in mind I will look at my box of 8 inch floppies, and the information they might contain, and realize that this gap of documentation is an example of the jumps made from one media system to the next that is likely lost to history.

From time to time, when sorting though boxes and folders of personal papers and office records, certain things will jump out at you as being out of place or not part of the original intention of the creator. Often times this addition to a collection is an unwanted biological guest like bugs or spiders (sometimes living but mostly dead), mold or mildew (usually dormant but sometimes active), and once I even saw the skeletal remains of a mouse (definitely an unintentional addition).

However, working with collections that focus on the health sciences, stumbling across a biological specimen is usually no accident at all. I've found random, unlabeled paraffin wax pathology samples as well as a wax cast of the inner ear (harvested post-mortem).

Today was a new anatomical sample in the archives. Inside this miniature cigar box were nearly two dozen envelopes containing extracted adult human teeth from the 1950s.

Most had their full roots and represented all types of molars, bicuspids, and incisors.

It was as if some contemptuous tooth fairy had stashed them away.

When collecting the records of an active institution, material trickles in over time, sometimes out of sequence and almost always with the promise of "there's more where that came from."

There are also discreet sets of material within an institution related to a particular project or office that is no longer in operation. This material is easier to bookend with a beginning and an end, but often comes to the archives in batches over a period of time. Such is the case with the records of the Board of Governors, an institutional body charged with the management of the University Hospitals from 1975-1996.

In October 2006 I discussed the acquisition of an almost complete run of the BoG minutes. I then identified an existing collection of BoG material already located at University Archives. A year later, my good friends at the Wangensteen Historical Library opened up a locked filing cabinet and discovered nearly 12 boxes worth of additional material related to the Board of Governors' activities.

For an institutional body that ceased to exist almost 12 years ago, the BoG had the ability to generate records faster than I could collect them.

Now, with the assistance of University Archives, all sets of material related to the Board of Governors are being organized as a single collection that will be available for research and administrative use.

Read the minutes from the first Board of Governors' meeting held on January 15, 1975:

It is a quiet Friday afternoon, a perfect time for processing.

The original material:

The material foldered and ready to be boxed:

The emptied binders:

What happens to the stuff I send to the archives?

Part III. Accessioning and Description

After materials arrive at the archives (Part I. Sending Materials to the Archives) and undergo a physical arrangement process (Part II. Initial Processing and Physical Arrangement) the collection is accessioned into the archives and a description of the materials is written to aid collection management and researcher access.

Accessioning is a formal process of taking physical custody of the materials and recording the date the materials arrived, contact information for the donor, the size of the collection upon arrival, a brief description of the materials, and any special considerations or needs that the collection will require during processing.

The description process is primarily the creation of a finding aid for the collection. Finding aids are an archival tool that attempts to facilitate access and explain the materials in their historical context. In its most basic form, finding aids provide easily readable summarized information about the collection. More detailed finding aids act as an outline for the collection and allow researchers and archivists to learn more information about the materials before looking in the boxes.

Older finding aids (pre 1990s) are often typed sheets of paper. After the introduction of the desktop computer and the WWW to the archival work flow, finding aids were written in popular desktop publishing programs and made available online using html markup or PDFs. By the late 1990s, archivists developed an encoding mechanism using SGML and later XML to create a standardized structure for electronic delivery. The standard, known as Encoded Archival Description (EAD), is commonly accepted as the preferred professional description format and allows finding aids to be discovered using popular search engines (Google) and library catalogs.

Snippet of EAD encoding

The material collected and described through the AHC History Project will follow these professional standards and will be available for users through either the University Archives web site or the University Libraries’ online database for University of Minnesota finding aids. Paper copies of all finding aids are also available at the University Archives for in-person use.

At this point, after accessioning and description, the materials will be physically stored in the caverns beneath Andersen Library. When a person identifies materials through the use of a finding aid or through a conversation with staff members at the archives, the boxes will be pulled and brought to a secure reading room for use.

I had the opportunity to attend the Midwest Archives Conference fall symposium “More Product, Less Process� (commonly referred to as the MPLP method) held Oct. 6-7 in Omaha, NE. The symposium focused on the major points made in the recent Greene/Meissner article “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing� in the American Archivist. It also had several guest speakers attesting to the practicality and benefits of minimal processing.

In a nutshell, the Greene/Meissner article (see an earlier version) asks archivists to reconsider the status quo of processing benchmarks. They argue that there is no minimum standard practiced in processing as there is in description practices and as such archivists have a hard time determining the level of processing a collection may require. Instead, archivists tend to process all collections to the same granularity and in doing so waste time and resources and add to the ever growing backlog. Greene/Meissner advocate processing all collections to a minimum standard. At that point, the archivist can make further processing decisions based on the condition and use of the collection and the availability of resources. In reality most archives already function with minimally processed collections or provide access to collections that have not been processed at all. Greene/Meissner recognize this practice and are simply advocating that it become a working standard.

As for the AHC archives project, there are already over 70 collections of papers and records related to the health sciences and the Academic Health Center at the University Archives that are either minimally or formally processed. The project will add to this number by adding accruals to existing collections and bringing in new free standing collections. As the acquisition of new materials begins, processing plans will need to be developed at the time of acquisition. The MPLP method will be a great tool in managing this influx of materials. Stay tuned and I will try to point out the decisions made during the project and how minimal processing works or doesn’t work with specific collection material along the way.