mizarchivist

I have ~~finished~~ -need to create a catalog entry and put the boxes on their shelves, but the boxes are out of my office- processing a collection I started in early December-- when it was unceremoniously dropped in the middle my office.

It's taken me a little over 30 hours, which is half the time of a standard Simmons intern's project. It started off as a little over 14 linear feet, and is now a lean 5.5 feet. (15 boxes and one handmade oversize folder). I normally don't chart my work, but for some reason, I thought it'd be good to know. I found that my standard session lasted half an hour and only at the very beginning and end lasted more than 1.5 hours.
So, it takes me about 2 hours to process an entirely raw linear foot of records. This doesn't really give a fair reading on the random cruft that goes into a multiple box set. The more boxes you add, the more evil miscellaneous is thrown in the mix. And save me from duplication. The last pastor of the church kept all the extra copies of everything and didn't take the time to pull them before she sent them to me. This is a reasonable scenario if the alternatives are that said representative either throws away the wrong stuff or takes ten times longer to hand over the promised goods. One thing I've learned during my tenure is that there is no hurrying church folk or volunteers. Or volunteer church folk.

Since finishing a collection like this is a nice milestone, I thought it'd be good to take a look at the small collections that only fill up 1-2 boxes when they're complete.

I usually ignore them as they come in. They live in my office until they build up a critical mass. Part of critical mass is that I don't have the storage space I ought, made obvious by the end of a standard collection's removal. This time I've acquired 24. By the time I shifted all of them to my work table, the shelving took on a spooky emptiness. So, as soon as I quit procrastinating here in LJ land, I'll get right on that. And when I'm done with those- probably mid next week- I'm going to have to tackle one of the several Big Jobs that have been looming on my horizon: The 60 box collection that isn't even in library space, rather in an office in our building. Or the dozen or more boxes that need to be integrated into one of the prominent and large (49 linear feet) church collections. Or revise another prominent collection whose guide is less than ideal, not in a digital format, and has parts not contained in any box, acid-free or otherwise. None of these I look forward to tackling. But I must.

Yay! Job security!!