Assignment 5

Greene and Miessner's article "More Product, Less Process" proposes that the processing of archival collections should be streamlined in order to minimize the current abundance of unprocessed materials.  In a broad sense, the article raises valid points, namely that user access to research materials should be the foremost concern for those responsible for managing collections, and that a more generalized, as opposed to a single-item, approach, would be an effective means of reducing archival backlogs.  However, not only are there problems with their suggestions for practical implementations of these theories (as already well articulated by Beth in her article review), the authors' dismissive attitudes towards preservation and conservation bring to light the challenges inherent in bridging the perceived gap between preservation and access.

By bemoaning the tendency to "fetishize the physical items in our holdings" (5) and describing modern collections as "a huge amount of frequently redundant material, in myriad forms, with no inherent appeal apart from their informational content" (5), the authors fail to acknowledge both the information contained in the materials as objects, and the fact that we cannot possibly predict what aspects of our collections will be of interest to future researchers.  Issues of access do not belong simply in the present, and to compare those who are concerned about future access to the police (27) implies an opposition that does not need to be present between serving users and serving materials.  Use of such language seems more likely to create divisions between conservators and archivists than to encourage constructive dialogue about how to balance diverse needs.

Clearly, the archival backlog means that changes must be made in processing practices, and the idea of a top-down approach is promising.  However, ideas for initial or theoretically temporary models, in which objects are briefly listed and described in order to allow researcher access before any preservation measures have taken place, are dangerous first because of the potential for damage when researchers handle materials in unknown condition, and also because once a collection has been processed to any degree, it is unlikely that it will receive any more attention while there are still other materials that are completely unprocessed.  By the same token, any plan in which materials are physically stabilized but not examined for content is equally flawed, since this would prevent it from being effectively prioritized for further processing.  Compromises will need to be made from all sides, but all aspects of processing must be addressed in order to maintain the quality of the collections while managing them efficiently.  Through collaboration, conservators, preservation administrators, and archivists should be able to devise solutions to safely streamline processing, but each must be open to accommodating the others' perspectives while advocating his or her own.