Presentation made to the Society of California Archivists General Meeting, 2012. This lightning talk focused on a triage approach to surfacing accession records to the public. At UCI, we are creating minimum DACS records for new accessions that are new collections, and adding a series-level component for new accessions that are additions to existing collections. Exposing these unprocessed materials to researchers gives us the opportunity to leave our backlog as-is until patron requests or funding allow for further processing.

1. Hello, my name is Audra and in the next 6 minutes, I am going to
show you how to solve all of your backlog problems. But
seriously…
…I’m going to talk about a triage approach taken at UC Irvine to
expose three types of accessions using Archivists’ Toolkit.
First, accessions that are new collections.
Second, accessions that are additions to unprocessed
collections.
Third, accessions that are additions to already processed
collections.
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2. Christine Weideman’s 2006 article, “Accessioning as Processing,”
introduced the MPLP philosophy earlier in the archival life cycle.
In the article, Weideman describes Yale’s goal to perform
minimal processing and description during the accessioning
process, including the creation of a finding aid. The theme of the
“exposing hidden collections” movement has been that: “some
access to all is preferable to no access to some.”
Here is an example of an unprocessed collection from Yale. As
you can see, they have provided excellent information about the
creator, a scope and content note that indicates the collection is
unprocessed, as well as a box inventory. But what if the
collection is completely unprocessed – what if you don’t have a
box inventory?
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3. In 2010, UCI initiated a project to create collection-level minimal
DACS finding aids for every unprocessed collection in our
backlog.
Here is an example. You can see that there is no inventory for
the collection and that the Access Note simply says, “This
collection has not been processed.”
The Yale or MPLP approach was useful in creating best practices
for minimally processing collections at the point of accessioning.
The collection-level minimal DACS project was quite valuable in
exposing unprocessed existing collections. But I found very little
published regarding accessioning in terms of providing access to
unprocessed accessions. Not minimally processed or semi-
processed, but simply unprocessed accessions.
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4. First, exposing accessions that make up an entirely new
collection. Every accession we create gets a finding aid and
MARC record almost right away.
In Archivists’ Toolkit, we create accession records fairly typically:
abstract/description, box inventory, dates, extent, and an access
restrictions note (as needed).
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5. Once we connect this to an AT Resource Record, we beef up the
finding aid a bit in order to make it a collection-level minimum
DACS compliant finding aid.
The basic idea is that we create an abstract from the accession
description, copy it into the scope and content note, and copy
the access note.
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6. How does this look in the OAC? Exactly the same as our
unprocessed collection records.
There is no inventory, but we have dates, extent, subjects, an
abstract, scope and contents note, as well as an access note.
The access note usually asks researchers to contact us in
advance to request access so that any restrictions review can
take place.
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7. Next, accessions that are additions to unprocessed collections.
This accession is an addition to a larger, unprocessed collection
of the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs records for UCI. Same
required info in this accession.
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8. In the AT Resource Record for the linked collection, everything
looks about the same – we update the extent and date
information. But in addition to this…
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9. …We add supplemental information to the Scope and Content
Summary, describing the newest addition to the collection. I
have summarized both the description and inventory notes in
the original accession. I want to provide context and specific
terminology regarding the new addition.
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10. In OAC, the collection remains listed as unprocessed in the
Access note, and my description of the scope and contents of
the addition have been added to the collection as a whole.
In this way, terms will be discoverable to researchers and will
point to the collection.
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11. Finally, accessions that are additions to processed collections.
Again, the same fields are being completed.
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12. When we connect this accession to a processed collection in AT,
we update extent information and dates.
But in order to retain the existing intellectual arrangement of
the collection, we create a series-level component for the new
accession.
We create a descriptive title for the addition such as
“Unprocessed correspondence” add dates and extent
information, and then, at the component level, we add a scope
and contents note and access note based on the accession.
How does this look in the OAC?
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13. The unprocessed records appear in the list of collection contents
as a series-level component. All notes appear along with the
title, including the scope and contents note and access note.
Again, this exposes accession-specific terms and formats to the
public.
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14. At Yale, they also add new accessions to processed collections as
a series-level component. The main difference is that at Yale,
they have minimally processed the accession.
Here is an example from Emory, which is nearly the same as
what we are doing at UCI. They have created a series in this
collection specifically for unprocessed additions, which includes
a scope and content note and a box number range.
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15. As we surface unprocessed collections and accessions, we seek
ways to track user interest through web statistics and requests
for on-site use. This information will help us create clearer
processing priorities.
“Forgetting the backlog” is an effort to consider access at the
point of accessioning. MPLP is about less PROCESSING, but it
also requires robust DESCRIPTION and contextualization. Our
goal is to make descriptions of our collections available as
quickly and as widely possible.
Thank you!
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