Weeding Through the Archives

 

During my internship with the Baltimore Museum of Industry, one of my favorite, and most challenging projects that I aided in was weeding through a vast collection consisting of materials from the Canton Railroad Company, Anne Arundel Corporation, Manning Company, Balmar, Baltimore Copper Paint (Oliver Reed Company), David A. Jacobs, USF&G, and Oak loom.  These materials were donated to the museum in the 1990s and early 2000s, with many boxes never being looked through or processed.  Much of the material came from the Canton Railroad Company, with the Baltimore Museum of Industry housing an estimated 700 boxes of material. 

            The issue with these collections was the way they were stored.  The collections were stored on pallets, inside banker boxes.  They were stacked up to five boxes high and three across, with approximately forty-five boxes on each pallet.  These boxes were stored so high that many began to collapse in on each other.  Another issue with the collections was that some had mold or water damage, making them dangerous to handle.  Finally, the collections had material that fell outside the collections policy of the Baltimore Museum of Industry.  The material included pay stubs, check stubs, personally identifiable information such as Social Security Numbers, receipts, invoices, timecards, and cashed checks.  

At the beginning of the summer, the Baltimore Museum of Industry received a grant to install shelving for the collections.  My job was to aid the archivist to weed through the collections and deaccession materials to make room for the shelving.  My tasks included placing the boxes of materials that remained on new pallets and disposing of the boxes and the materials inside of them that were deaccessioned.  Throughout this process, I tried to focus on what was being deaccessioned and how my supervisor made these decisions.  This taught me much about the difference between record management and archives.  Records management keeps track of a company's finances, while an archive should strive to tell a complete story of a company.  Material that fit record management normally fell out of the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s collection policy; therefore, our approach to making deaccessioning decisions was to determine if the material met the current collections policy of the museum.  Most of the material I listed above such as the pay stubs, check stubs, and other financial material fell out of the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s collection policy and was deaccessioned.  This was an intriguing project because it dealt with an aspect of archives that is broadly ignored, or sometimes frowned upon, which is deaccessioning.  Although it sometimes felt wrong to discard a company's records, it also taught me that an archivist needs to be mindful of the space that they have in their collections, the time it takes to process a collection, and to consider the collection policy very carefully.  One thing I learned from this project is that an archive is only as good as its collection policy.