An archives blitz is a sweet but rare treat. Imagine a group of professionals closing in on unwieldy, unorganized, and poorly cared for rooms of amassing records and in just a short amount of time flipping the whole thing into something organized, accessible, and complete.
My colleagues and I make up a small team of three and are employed as Archivists through the Great Basin Institute, a non-profit organization that many National Parks partner with to bring in museum and archives professionals. It’s through this partnership that the three of us work at Zion National Park on collections for Zion, Bryce Canyon National Park, and Cedar Breaks National Monument. Niche federal collections have their challenges with the most common being the overall lack of a permanent Archivist to provide care and oversight. Sometimes a staff member of a park will be assigned museum curatorial or archives work as collateral duty; sometimes there isn’t an opportunity to assign the work to anyone; and sometimes a team of three puts together and plans an archives blitz to solve some of the biggest issues.
Our blitz had these priorities:
- get all accessioned and potential records behind a limit-access locked door
- create inventories and processing notes to have some intellectual organization over the space
- cease opportunities to discuss records management with staff when possible
We had 5 days to do it.
To achieve our first goal of establishing a safe place for records to be housed, we did an unimaginable amount of heavy lifting to reorganize the space of the small room we were given. It was nothing short of a miracle, blood, sweat, and almost tears that we were able to bring in six units of steel flat file drawers for the maps, plans, and drawings collection. These maps were our number one priority because, up until the blitz, they had been stored in a public hallway for all to access.
Left is before – right is after.
We were happy to see an accessioned collection living behind a locked door and the supplies for processing on wheeled carts in the public space. It felt like we set something right in a world that had long been problematic.
Once the space was arranged, we turned our attention to rooms filled with records that staff had set aside for appraisal over several years. Using two federal retention schedules, we moved through the records appraising them for their intrinsic and mandated value, dwindling the number of records down by removing superfluous duplicates and documentation. It took us the better part of the morning, but with a team of three we were able to complete the appraisal and relocate the records in one day. Now, the rolling shelves in the processing room were full of new records to be accessioned and our focus could turn to the nitty-gritty of the maps, plans, and drawings collection inventory.
Despite having moved all of the maps, the three of us had little idea how many were in the collection when we jumped into the inventory. The collection was at varying degrees of completion with some folders unaccessioned, some accessioned but not described, and some described but in different locations. With the knowledge of a researcher needing this collection in the forefront of our goal for this collection, we did our best to create an accurate representation of what is in the collection. Moving slowly and thoroughly through every folder and drawer, we assigned cabinet, drawer, and folder numbers to everything in order to vastly improve accessibility going forward.
By the end of the last day, we had an inventory of over 3,000 maps, several processing plans for the records on the shelves, and a secure archives processing room. The amount of work we were able to accomplish in a week’s time would have taken any one of us months individually. The benefits to the collection were invaluable and now, as we look at the collections of the other parks we assist, we sweetly dream of archives blitzing those, too.
By: Kimberlee Roberts, Rebecca Finnigan, and Emily Moran
The National Park Service has numerous archives and museums around the United States and is an interesting way of participating in government records. If you’re interested in learning more about government records and opportunities in that area of archives, please check out the Government Records Section of SAA.
SNAP Section 