Dear all
Thanks to those who responded to my posting yesterday with
some very interesting comments. Not exactly inundated Sarah,
but a useful start at discussion has been made!
It has been pointed out to me that the use of the term "non-
specialist repository" in my original posting was ambiguous and
that that term generally refers to a "local government record office".
To clarify, I would be interested to hear from people who work in
non media-specialist repositories, so this may include record
offices which have mixed collections but also other (business,
university and museum) organisations. It has also been suggested
that it sounded like I wanted list members to write my essay for
me. Not at all. I am keen to discuss with people their views on
mixed collections and if/how they approach the fundamental
archival tasks of the physical care, intellectual control and making
available of archival records that exist in a variety of formats.
I can't totally agree with Sarah's views on the description of
magnetic media, although I suspect differing contexts will engender
different approaches. Individual video recordings (or, as Richard
Taylor mentioned to me, "stray sound recordings") "sundered from
their original context" may well be dealt with satisfactorily using
library tools, but surely if, as in my work with folklore/ethnographic
collections, records are created in the course of a particular
(fieldwork) project and encompass related notebooks, photographs,
sound recordings, video recordings and photographs, then here the
archival principles of provenance and original order are extremely
relevant and important. I agree with Gary Collins' point that the
format of the item is of no concern when listing, that the
provenance of the item and its relationship to others is of
paramount importance. Physical separation where necessary, but
intellectual integration.
>From the answers I am getting, perhaps it is the case that the
issue of maintaining the intellectual integrity of a mixed media
collection through multi-level finding aids does not arise in local
government record offices, and is more likely to be addressed in
business, university and museum special collection contexts.
Robin Wiltshire
Archives Assistant
National Centre for English Cultural Tradition
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TN
Phone: 0114 2220195
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