Reading 9

Foster, Anne L. (2006). Minimum Standards Processing and Photograph Collections. Archival Issues, 30(2), 107-118.

While I did not process collections of photographs as part of my internship, I will likely have to handle such collections or collections containing a significant number of photographs during my professional career. This article provides a helpful overview of the ways in which the "More Product, Less Process" (MPLP) approach to archival processing was used by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks Archives to make large collections of photographs, which their employees had been trying to process for years, accessible to researchers by finding new processing standards.

The author begins by describing previous attempts by the archive to handle its growing photographs collection. These included a vertical file (1966-1980) in which all the photographs in the collections were kept. Photographs were removed from their original collections, which often meant that provenance information was lost. From 1980 to 1990, the archive tried to maintain provenance information by keeping the photographs with the collections with which they arrived, but filing them separately from the rest of the materials in the collection and organizing them into the same categories used in the vertical file system. From 1990 to 2003, the archive maintained a photo database, but the ever-larger collections which the archive received quickly overwhelmed the database. Additionally, each of these methods required time consuming, item-level processing.

The Alaskan archivists first applied the MPLP approach to the William 0. Field Papers, which included about 40,000 photographs. They did not process the items at the item level, deciding that researchers were unlikely to be interested in specific images, and they merely placed fragile items in a cold-storage vault rather than spending large amounts of time on conservation efforts.

They then received a grant to test the MPLP process on a large variety of collections, and they found the approach to work very well. They noted that one of its particular strengths was its flexibility--it does not prescribe a particular level of processing, but rather that only the minimum amount of processing necessary to make a collection accessible be performed until use justifies further processing. In contrast to their previous methods, they did not weed, number, or sleeve photographs until they received a request for a copy of an image, at which point it was necessary to assign numbers to all the photographs in the series as part of their photograph reproduction workflow. Only certain categories of images--particularly fragile items, pre-gold rush images, images related to "hot topics," and images from collections which came with a donation to finance extra processing--received the level of processing and conservation treatments they had once attempted for all their collections.

They note that one case in which MPLP processing would seemingly not be ideal is when a collection will be digitized, since this generally necessitates describing the images at the item level. However, they tried to be more rigorous in their appraisal of collections before they were digitized, discarding unnecessary images, and they tried to reduce the amount of metadata added to the images to save time. However, they found that the software they used to manage and make their photographs available in an online environment was designed for detailed description and did not allow them to automatically combine collection-level metadata with batch imported images.

Overall, this article provides a good overview of how the popular MPLP approach to processing can be applied to photographs and addresses the potential pitfalls of using this technique on collections of images.