Something for Everything: Thoughts on Archival Description at Princeton Dan Santamaria PACSCL: Something New for Something Old Conference December 4, 2008

Project Context Inexpensive and relatively non-labor intensive once procedures are in place Essentially two full-time staff -- one professional, one support staff Cataloging completed in about 3 months by support staff member

Institutional Context  Princeton University established 1746  Princeton University Archives established 1959  Prior to 1990s access to University Archives was limited and arbitrary (much more attention given to public policy collections also held at Mudd).  Number of finding aids in 1990: 0  By 2005, 2/3 of University Archives lacked descriptive records of any kind

Institutional context  Stated goals Gain acceptable level of intellectual control of collections. Provide minimum level of online access to collections (collection level records). Provide a centralized entry point for researchers and staff

Our Approach  Survey entire University Archives and record holdings/location information and very (very) basic descriptive data  Summer 2007 create collection level records for all University Archives collections MARC DACS single level optimum  Summer 2008 convert all MARC to EAD  Processing and EAD retroconversion happening concurrently

Our Approach  Why MARC?

Collection Level EAD

Conclusions Standards are essential to the process Adherence to content standards Structured data is essential to the process Archival description needs to get more data-centric

Conclusions Description is an iterative process Descriptive records are dynamic  Can be expanded based on need or when additional resources become available  Can include data from a variety of sources Staff, including public services, curators, users

Conclusions Description is an iterative process Not limited to traditional archival outputs  Can also form the descriptive infrastructure for digitization/digital library program  Can be manipulated in multiple ways Let the user do the arrangement!

Conclusions  Better infrastructure needs to develop Editing records is still a very manual process Tracking/collection management still difficult Traditional finding aid displays still problematic for large/complex collections

Conclusions  Need to advocate for integration with library technical infrastructure Support for special collections systems not traditionally seen as responsibility of library systems (both budget and staff)

Conclusions  Archival description has a lot to offer “If the Library of Congress’s well proven approach won’t work as we digitize our information, ideas, and knowledge, what will? David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous At Princeton, EAD suggested or already in use  Engineering library technical reports  Latin American Ephemera  Rare Print Materials  Digital Objects

Questions? 