Cataloging at the item level -- why we do it.
Current wisdom in the Archival world is to catalog everything as quickly as possible, to leave it at maybe the box or folder level, and call it good. It gets things done and up quickly, so there’s time to deal with an ever-increasing backlog. I understand this, I really do. And sometimes, that’s the best method, especially when dealing with things that are more or less of a kind, or have minimal variation, like a collection I did last year that was, by and large, receipts and bills. (Yes, it was probably someone’s box of rubbish, but it had been around since the 1830s so it was old enough to not be rubbish anymore. And yes, it was the most boring sort of interesting I have ever seen. Full of great information, if you could get through it.) The collection I’m currently working on is exactly the sort of collection for which MPLP isn’t necessarily the best method.Â
The Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation Photos are an enormous collection, almost 16,000 photos (negatives, 4 x 5 contact prints, and 8 x 10 prints) from 1942-1946, with indexes (printed on the great-grandmother of a dot matrix and bound with a hard cover), the notes from making the indexes, and at least two film reels, that cover an incredible number of topics, themes, and (to be perfectly honest) degrees of interest. I cannot tell you how many photos of boxes we have cataloged. Or pallets. Or Liberty ships, some of which at least have interesting things painted on them, or tiny men like ants hanging out tiny laundry around the guns. They are contrasted, though, with photos of people dancing, WACs at the beach or hunting for the perfect tree, soldiers painting or showing off collections, men and women embarking and coming home, ships that were shot with an eye for beauty and line rather than basic documentation. It jumps back and forth between them so quickly, you can’t just say “This box is all the photos of how to store airplane engines, but they really only mean gigantic crates and not actual engines” and “These are all the pretty WACs” and “These are stacks of jeeps and other vehicles”.Â
The best illustration, though, for why we catalog so finely came this morning with a man who replied to a post from the museum blog about the Tuskegee Airmen, who had passed through here right around New Year’s 1944. I had information for one man in the group of six, but could not identify the others. A man had found the post, and recognized his cousin in the photo, a man who died in 1951, in the Korean War. And here he was, a young man about to leave for his first mission. The corroborating documentation he sent allowed the creation of an authority record for his cousin, making it that much easier for anyone in the future to find him. The fact that the man who contacted us found the photograph was pure chance, and it should not have to be. The more individual items we can make available (and by we I don’t just mean The mariners’ Museum), the more connections can be made between the present and the past, and the less those connections will be dependent on pure random chance.
