What a week!
Mar. 21st, 2015 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotI've been trying to really get into accessioning this week, and I've made great headway. There's a card table piled high with objects, mostly paper, a bunch of stuff in my "office" (upstairs; I think it's a holdover from when they could afford a full-time admin person and the collections manager didn't have to sit near the front door), and a bunch of stuff in the collections. The card table's been my object: I've been taking a batch of stuff back to my desk, then sorting through it to decide if it's a) crap we don't want, b) things we obviously want, or c) material the archivist ought to look at to determine whether or not it would benefit the archives, because I don't know if we already have it or something like it. So -
- 1840s letters to a family in the county (from England!) -> yes, definitely
- early 20th century books on local topics -> I can't make that call
- all the records from the local retired teachers' association up to the 1990s -> PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME ACCESSION ALL OF THEM
Really, I only created 11 accession groups over the past couple of days, but I got through almost every single thing on the table - there are piles everywhere, neatly arranged, and I made a typed list for the archivist so she doesn't have to touch it all. Hopefully she'll be able to rule on it quickly so I can move all of it out of the way and start bringing stuff down from the upper floors. Part of me can't understand how they got to the point where they were hardly accessioning everything and just letting it all build up - this is for years, the earliest non-accessioned things came in in 2007 - but then I guess once you've put the paperwork off for a year or two it starts to seem like an insurmountable project. Sue told me yesterday that she was impressed with the way I dove in.
Not impressive yesterday: I struggled mightily with balancing the deposit, reconciling the membership renewal list and the actual checks. It turned out that the computer printed one guy's listing twice in a row for NO REASON (I didn't put it in twice, and when I printed the list out a different way it didn't happen), and one person who was previously paying the Individual rate downgraded to Senior and I didn't change the automatic dues from $30 to $25. It was hours, we were all doing the math over and over again and getting different answers each time, I was laughing hysterically at intervals because it was so ridiculous.
- 1840s letters to a family in the county (from England!) -> yes, definitely
- early 20th century books on local topics -> I can't make that call
- all the records from the local retired teachers' association up to the 1990s -> PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME ACCESSION ALL OF THEM
Really, I only created 11 accession groups over the past couple of days, but I got through almost every single thing on the table - there are piles everywhere, neatly arranged, and I made a typed list for the archivist so she doesn't have to touch it all. Hopefully she'll be able to rule on it quickly so I can move all of it out of the way and start bringing stuff down from the upper floors. Part of me can't understand how they got to the point where they were hardly accessioning everything and just letting it all build up - this is for years, the earliest non-accessioned things came in in 2007 - but then I guess once you've put the paperwork off for a year or two it starts to seem like an insurmountable project. Sue told me yesterday that she was impressed with the way I dove in.
Not impressive yesterday: I struggled mightily with balancing the deposit, reconciling the membership renewal list and the actual checks. It turned out that the computer printed one guy's listing twice in a row for NO REASON (I didn't put it in twice, and when I printed the list out a different way it didn't happen), and one person who was previously paying the Individual rate downgraded to Senior and I didn't change the automatic dues from $30 to $25. It was hours, we were all doing the math over and over again and getting different answers each time, I was laughing hysterically at intervals because it was so ridiculous.
