Week 2 – Beginning Stages of Processing

After the 2nd full week of my archives internship, I have gotten a chance to make some solid progress on processing the Ruth C. Engs collection.  For those of you less familiar with archives terminology, the Society of American Archivists Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology defines processing as “The arrangement, description, and housing of archival materials for storage and use by patrons.”  In simple terms, this is when an archivist organizes a collection of records that an archives has received and then creates a written document to communicate important information about the collection to the patron.

The first step in processing the collection, which I completed this week, is surveying the collection as a whole.  The goal of doing this surveying is to achieve a basic understanding of the collection, its contents, and its organizational structure by opening up each box and taking some notes about these aspects of the collection. 
Fortunately for me, Professor Engs included a list which explained the context of each box (there were 24 boxes in total to begin with, but we will be able to condense the collection a bit by re-packing the boxes and removing duplicates.)  However, it is still a good idea to survey each box to achieve a better understanding of order and content. 

After completing the surveying of the collection, it is then time to identify the series into which the archivist will separate the collection.  The SAA Glossary defines a series as “a group of similar records that are arranged according to a filing system and that are related as the result of being created, received, or used in the same activity.”  So, if one were to consider an archival collection as an outline, a series would be represented by the most prominent bullet point.  Series are usually influenced by both the original order of the collection as well as the intellectual organization that the archivist decides would be most helpful for the creation of a collection so that it serves as a useful resource for patrons in the future.  Since the collection was already divided up many clearly defined small categories, the task at hand was to organize these small groups into a handful of series in order to create an overarching organizational structure. 

After completing the surveying of the Engs collection, I decided to create a series dedicated to the records of her writings, research, and professional activities, a series that contains her correspondence, another that contains her teaching files, another that contains administrative and tenure-related material, another that contains some early-life material, and one for non-paper media.  Having spent a fair amount of time around archives, I have observed patterns in how academics’ archival collections tend to be organized in terms of the creation of series, so having that familiarity made things a bit easier.

After having spent a few weeks with the collection, it is clear that it will be a very useful collection once processed for several reasons.  First, the collection is very complete, as it contains materials on almost all of Professor Engs’ journal publications and books, including drafts and correspondence related to the publication of each work.  This point leads to another reason why I think the collection is strong; Prof Engs’ papers will provide the researcher with a clear understanding of her research process, from the development of research plans to the publication stage.