Recently project archivist Adri­ane Han­son par­tic­i­pated in a panel at the recent spring con­fer­ence of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Con­fer­ence (MARAC) in Cape May, NJ. The topic of her talk was how she is han­dling the size of her cur­rent project, pro­cess­ing 2,500 lin­ear feet of the records of the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union Records in a two-year project funded by the National His­tor­i­cal Pub­li­ca­tions and Records Com­mis­sion (NHPRC).

In a nut­shell, this feat is accom­plished by:

1. Stay on top of the sched­ule through care­ful project man­age­ment, col­lect­ing met­rics to have real­is­tic data on how long each task requires, and fre­quently revis­it­ing and adjust­ing the time­line of the project.

2. Be flex­i­ble about the work­flow, exam­in­ing the way you have always done things and adjust­ing as needed to bet­ter work with a mas­sive collection.

3. Think of it as data man­age­ment. Use tools to repur­pose data from one step of the project to another, and to ana­lyze and trans­form the data once the box inven­to­ries are complete.

4. Spend extra time writ­ing descrip­tions about each part of the col­lec­tion to pro­vide the researcher with impor­tant key­words to search for and con­text to under­stand the sig­nif­i­cance of the sec­tion. But do not spend time on descrip­tion that is not aid­ing in search­ing, such as lists of doc­u­ment types in the col­lec­tion inven­tory. Time should be spent on value-added description.

The slides and text for her pre­sen­ta­tion are avail­able here.

If you have any ques­tions for her, you can reach her by email: