November 2018

 

Month: November 2018

Moving our collections to the online environment for outreach and for research access

We’ve discussed taking our show on the road, that is, making our archival collections discoverable in the online environment. Up to now, we have a mention on the town’s website, buried several clicks down under town committees, but our cataloguing and even a listing of our holdings have been restricted to an internal collections management software designed for museums, or scatter-shot in documents across several computer desktops within the town office, neither of which is accessible to the exterior town members and the research community.

In previous postings, we have discussed the pros and cons of PastPerfect, the software we have, and ArchivesSpace, the industry standard for the archives community. Meanwhile, I have focused my efforts on identifying and consolidating our holdings and managing for space efficiency. Through our efforts, we are approaching those milestones and beginning to cast our managerial glance both inward, on improvements in collections management, and outward, on outreach and accessibility.

At conferences (and, more specifically, at unconferences) I have seen demonstrations of Omeka, a web hosting and collections management system used by, it turns out, many archival organizations. Over the Thanksgiving break I visited the Omeka website and considered that it may be useful for the applications we are looking for. This week, I began building a prototype on the web-based application, Omeka.net. Here is a link to our beginnings on Omeka: https://garrettparkarchives.omeka.net/

on Moving our collections to the online environment for outreach and for research access

Processing in place: discovering the records overflow in the attic

Some photos from the building attic, where overflow records from the Town Office have been stored/stashed/hidden for the past ten years. Plowing through these boxes, as well as vertical file drawers in the office, have occupied the bulk of my time since my last post here.

The “Autumn Cleaning” began in the Town Office itself, after the decision was made to purchase a new server system and  the requirement arose to clear out old file drawers to make space for the server components. Ultimately, we moved eight vertical file drawers (two sets of four each) of records to the archives, using the recently submitted records retention schedule to separate “good stuff” from garbage. The transformation and reconfiguration of the archives cited in earlier posts freed up significant space and opened the possibility, first in our minds, and later in actual space, for such a  consideration (yes, I’m taking credit for it!). Something happened in town finances and I was directed first to decrease my already part-time hours, then later, to bill the Town directly and apart from the archives salary budget for all my time spent on official town records (which had become about 80% of my time). A bit of a bait-and-switch, perhaps, and one that I would not have accepted so casually in an earlier time in an earlier career. But I watched it unfold and accepted it as part of my dues to my new profession.

I had known since the beginning of my time here about the records storage in the attic, but it was too hot during the summer months to try to tackle the project. In October, with temperatures lower, I took the attic plunge. We moved a folding table up the rickety attic staircase, along with acid free folders, Hollinger boxes, and lots of sharpened pencils. The attic, by the way, served as bedrooms in a boarding house back in the day, when the post-mistress also ran housing for single men who were casually employed in the town and nearby. The maintenance guys tell me the post-mistress had a dog who lived upstairs, and that the ghost of the dog runs through from time to time. So far, i haven’t had the privilege of meeting up with the ghost dog!

So far I have processed eight boxes of Town Council meeting minute files, one box for every year from 2004 to 2011, and four boxes of audio cassette tapes of actual meeting proceedings. 2012 through 2015 are already accessioned to the archives (about the time an actual archivist was here), and the remains are still in vertical files in the Town Office. One thing I have noticed is that the Town Council folders have way too many duplicate copies of everything and I’ll be able to address that in my expanded responsibilities as Town Records manager. If I last.

Most of the banker boxes are filled with town business files, i.e., procurement and contracting files, employment records, and business records for goods and services . Most of them will be retired and disposed of in accordance with the records retention schedule.

Meanwhile, we are doing a pretty major re-arrangement and re-description of many of our sub-collections, reducing overlaps, consolidating subject similarities. The catalog of our holdings is a work in progress, but many of our users are happy to see the whole of our holdings in one place. Finally, in anticipation of new official responsibilities as records manager, I separated all the official “inherently government” files, folders and boxes and gave them all a separate rack in the mobile rack system.