By Haley H.
While the Allentown Band Archive and the Moravian Archive have vastly different budgets and amounts of people allocated toward making sure that they run smoothly, they both met with a similar problem. The biggest dilemma that both archives are faced with is accessibility, which is something that Greene & Meissner touch on in their piece, More product, less process. While the potentially useful artifacts of the present and times past are being stored in these facilities, it is hard to get the word out to the interested public about these items existence.
The first step towards accessibility is moving materials from open-air piles (See figure 1), where they are prone to deterioration, to broadly categorized, unprocessed boxes (see figure 2) while maintaining provenance, which is the organizational schema of the materials from before they were archived. By doing this, archivists can display more of the breadth of the material that they have in their archives to the public without having to allocate the time it takes to fully catalog the material. For example, only twenty-five percent of the Moravian Archive collection is processed. With this being said, Tom, from the Moravian Archive, made a point to say that neatly labeled, searchable, acid-free boxes that are referenceable through a finding aid are still the ideal way of storing materials.
It is a lamentable fact that it is impossible to, at all times, have the entirety of the objects in an archive cataloged, but the best thing an archivist can do is continue to wrestle with balancing the amount of material they process with the amount of material that is broadly classified in a way that is accessible to the public. It is my hope that the work we do creating finding aids for a subset of the Band’s archive will serve as a necessary step in this direction for their massive amounts of uncategorized materials.
Figure 1: Allentown Band Archive
Figure 2: Broadly categorized, unprocessed boxes at the Moravian Archive
