[Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement

[Forstrom, Michael]

For starters, I'd also like to publicly congratulate Susan and her colleagues on the Workbook.

I'll respond to Susan's call for "other experiences" with personal archives containing digital materials and move on to discussion relating to arrangement. At the Beinecke Library we've been acquiring manuscript collections with what I've indentified as fugitive digital content (small numbers of disks) for roughly a decade. At Beinecke these disks tend to reside in the papers of writers and in the records of small presses and literary journals and they tend to contain word processing files, such as drafts of writings or letters.

We've processed several personal archives containing disks and discovered that, in general, small numbers of disks and files lend themselves to item-level analysis and arrangement by content and larger numbers of disks and files lend themselves to arrangement by format. There are of course other considerations, but these are the two models we've pursued to date.

We recently acquired our first real hybrid archive--a writer in mid-career. We made a macro/functional appraisal and a snapshot accession, copying files, incuding email, directly off two working machines in the writer's home. In doing so, I should add, we tested a revised Paradigm records survey and transfer protocol. We may be able to respect the original order in arrangement, though processing will be complicated by the fact that there is duplication between the machines and variations in the directories. Assuming additions to this collection, a preliminary proposal is to leave well enough alone and not integrate the digital and paper components at this time. We need to revisit this, but there is an argument for tackling this now, doing some additional appraisal, testing appraisal tools, in general, doing more so that some of the complexities of the accession, say, context provided through dialogue with the author, isn't lost or difficult to interpret at the point of future processing.

So, a couple questions for Susan. First, whether any Paradigm project collections have been fully processed? And second, if you conducted any snapshot accessions as part of the project, what if any additional work was  done on them in house. Other comments welcome of course.

Best,
Michael Forstrom
Manuscript Unit
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
New Haven, CT   06520
203.432.7215

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