I am trying to write a paper about project management in archives processing, and I’m finding it hard. To me, much of this “advice” I’m giving is common sense, simply looking at a problem and breaking it into workable parts efficiently and effectively.
I have to remember, though, that this is a particular skill I have that others don’t. Some people are incredibly talented artists, others are great leaders of people, and some have a magical way with animals. None of that is me. I’m a problem solver.
When I see someone solve a problem well, I admire it. I study it. I try, if necessary, to duplicate it. So I was very interested in the State Archives of Florida’s recent blog post about the Koreshan Unity Collection. If you take a look at the post, you’ll see very effective project management procedures in action: initial inventory, controlled resorting, and the start of actual processing (they aren’t done with it yet). It was a chaotic collection to walk in on, which honestly in my experience seems to happen more often than not with 20th century collections.
With that in mind I’m going to kick off a series of posts about project management, and how/why to apply it to collections processing. Part of this will feed into the paper I’m working on, but some of it will just be me yakking about my own experiences in corporate records management, software development, and, yes, archives processing.
