Gaining Physical Control of the Material

After your processing proposal has been approved, and you have determined the necessary level of description, you are ready to begin processing the collection. The level of description, along with the types and variety of materials in the collection, will typically correspond to how much physical handling will be involved in the processing. The care of archival materials is critical to its preservation and longevity; however, under an efficient processing approach, the handling of items will be significantly reduced compared to more traditional procedures.1

Physical and Intellectual Arrangement

During processing, the physical and intellectual arrangement of collection material often takes place simultaneously. If your collection necessitates some level of physical rearrangement, you will likely need to think in terms of topical, hierarchical, and/or series arrangement at the same time that you are arranging the materials. Similarly, you will want to avoid arrangement of materials solely based on format. For example, it is rare that an entire series will solely be electronic records (ERs). ERs can hold any variety of content such as correspondence, photographs, or moving images, and should be intellectually incorporated into the collection arrangement based on content.

Until you have completed physically arranging the collection, the final order will continue to remain in flux, so it is best to avoid writing numbers on folders until this task is finalized. This is most pertinent in large collections, in which unanticipated material may surface in unexpected places.

When working with a large and complex collection it is best to work using the ArchivesSpace Processing Spreadsheet Template, since you can enter data as you work, and easily move items around before committing to a folder number or hierarchical location. Even after the information has been imported into ASpace, or if you choose to enter data directly into ASpace, it can still easily be intellectually rearranged. See the section of this manual on Archival Description and the ASpace User Guide for information about rearrangement in ASpace.

  1. Greene and Meissner stress that “It must be our aim to provide sufficient physical and intellectual access to collections for research to be possible, without the necessity of processing each collection to an ideal or arbitrary standard. Tension between housekeeping compulsions and user needs must be resolved in favor of user needs: we cannot continue to let item-level preservation work undermine more rational decisions to arrange a collection only to series or folder level.” Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” The American Archivist 68, no. 2 (September 1, 2005): 237, doi:10.17723/aarc.68.2.c741823776k65863. ↩