#lostandfoundtimes

This was such an exciting project! It was great to be able to apply concepts from class in a real way- the document we drew up will go on Special Collection’s website as the finding aid for the John Bennett Zine collection!

Before we started the project, the three of us talked about what we expected the process to look like. We figured we’d have to alphabetize the zines, and then describe each one individually, with notes about the art, etc. Our impression was VERY off, as there was no description of any sort, which made our jobs easier, but would seem to make it harder on researchers.

For this project, I read an article called “More Product, Less Process”, which deals exactly with this thinking discrepancy. In the past, it has been the policy to describe collections down to an item level, that is to put every single thing in the box into the finding aid. This takes, of course, hours and hours of time, and surveys show that researchers do not want or need this kind of description. It might not have taken us very long to describe the zines, but for a librarian to describe an entire university’s collection down to the item level would take a laughable amount of time.

“More Product, Less Process” (or MPLP as it’s often abbreviated) advocates for there to be less description (process) and more getting-it-in-the-catalog (product). What good is a collection if researchers don’t know it’s there? Unprocessed collections are commonly called “dark” collections, because they exist but no one outside of the department (and sometimes not everyone in the department) knows they’re there. At University of Iowa, for instance, we have a large “dark” collection of maps that haven’t been processed. The overarching term for “dark” collections is “backlog”, and is unfortunately a huge problem for collections all over the world.

“So that’s little B, big B, little B, big B....”