Processing Note

See DACS 7.1.8

Processing notes should describe any change to the collection carried out by archives staff, as well as intentional maintenance of original order. The note should include:

• The state of the collection when it came to the archive
• The year processing or accessioning took place
• The names of staff and student workers who processed or accessioned the collection
• A description of any changes made to the collection that may affect a researcher's understanding of the material in question
• Note if the container listing or other metadata was provided by the donor.*
• Note whether files have been reformatted and/or normalized for preservation or access. In addition, note tool, process or application used to transcode files, as well as the types changed
• Uncopied or unrecovered media should also be noted, with the reason given (e.g. a technological error such as an unrecognized files system, physical degradation that prevents an item from being oread, or a combination thereof)

*When titles for materials are transcribed from donor listings, material housing, etc., a processing note should also be added at the appropriate series or sub-series level that explicitly states where material titles originate from. Examples:

“All titles in this series were taken directly from a donor-provided inventory.”

“Titles in quotations in this series are derived directly from labels on the materials’ housing. All other titles in this series are archivist-supplied.”

Example from the Bechdel papers:

Initial processing of the collection was undertaken soon after the first donation arrived in 2008. Bechdel's sketches, which arrived in large plastic tubs, were rehoused in boxes while maintaining their original chronological order. About half of the sketches were foldered and described during this process (boxes 7-10B).

From February to April 2022, the collection was processed by Collections Archivist Dan Michelson and student assistants Vivian DeRosa, Beata Knecht, and Grace Hartley. Processing was based on a plan written by former Processing Archivist Madison White in 2019. The remaining sketches were foldered and described (still maintaining original intellectual order, with minor adjustments to the physical order for preservation) and the rest of the collection was physically and intellectually arranged into six series based largely on how Bechdel grouped them and described.

One floppy disk was copied to networked storage for preservation; the original directory and file structure was retained. Two floppy disks (labeled as containing mailing lists) were unable to be copied.

Other examples:

When transferring her email to Special Collections, Cindy Pearson created labels to categorize her messages by year (e.g. SSC 2020) and used Google Takeout Service to download the files in mbox format. The files were received on a flash drive, copied, and viewed using Mozilla Thunderbird. Due to some technical issues with the Google Takeout Service, some of the mbox files cover additional years not represented by the label or filename. For example, "SSC 2007" includes emails from 2007 as well emails from 2006 and 2009. A file list was created with date ranges per mbox file.

The contents of 15 of 47 disks was copied to networked storage for preservation and access; and file lists were created. 30 disks were unreadable, although some disks were unlabeled and may not have contained any files. 2 commercial software disks were intentionally not copied. See attached log file for more information.

A Note on Digital Surrogates

Processing notes should be added at the archival object level when only select portions of an archival object were digitized. Processing notes are not needed if the entire archival object was digitized. For example:

Select material in this [folder/volume/item] was digitized in [YYYY]. The digitized content does not represent the full contents of the [folder/volume/item].