This article describes the efforts of archivists and student assistants at the University of Pittsburgh's Archives Service Center to organize, describe, store, and provide timely and efficient access to over 8,000 maps of underground coal mines in southwestern Pennsylvania, as well the records that accompanied them, donated by CONSOL Energy, Inc.…

Ensuring the long-term preservation and use of born-digital and digitized records of enduring value has preoccupied archivists and their cultural heritage siblings for several decades. The professional literature of the 1980s and 1990s bemoans the challenges posed by rapid technological change (and the concomitant obsolescence of hardware and…

The cataloging of otherwise unprocessed collections is an innovative minimal processing technique with important implications for reference service. This article mines the existing literature for how institutions engaged in minimal processing view reference, the strengths and weaknesses of catalog records as finding aids, and information about…

In the five years since its publication, "More Product, Less Process" (MPLP) has received a great deal of attention within the archival community and this interest has more recently emerged in library and museum communities as well. In this article the MPLP authors reflect on the impact of MPLP among its adopters and its critics, examine some…

Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner published their influential article "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing" five years ago. This study assesses the impact of the methodologies expounded by Greene and Meissner on processing and reference in the archival profession. A broad survey of American archivists conducted in…

Regular evaluation of archival reference services is essential to ensure that users have appropriate access to the information they need. Archives New Zealand has been measuring customer satisfaction for many years using self-completion questionnaires but recently trialed two new methods of evaluation, using external research companies. One…

While archivists and their repositories depend a great deal on public trust, they do little to cultivate or protect it. All too often, the archival community is passive where it should be fiercely proactive. This article aims to show archivists how they can build on the trust they have and avoid many of the problems that have plagued the archival…

Bertillon cards are underutilized resources, often regarded as the remnants of an antiquated nineteenth century police identification system. Through the application of computer search techniques, data manipulation, and outreach, not only can institutions provide their patrons access to this unique information, these collections can in turn help…

This article explores ontological principles and their potential applications in the formal description of archival photographs. Current archival descriptive practices are reviewed and the larger question is addressed: do archivists who are engaged in describing photographs need a more formalized system of representation, or do existing encoding…

The trend among public historians, educators, museum curators, and archivists is to find some means of making complex historical content readily accessible. At national sites, in the classroom, and on the Web, their efforts are aimed at drawing audiences and stimulating an engagement with history. While these efforts are laudable and surely…

Functional analysis has been incorporated widely into appraisal methods for decades. These methods, from documentation strategy to macroappraisal, are discussed, and the usefulness and limitations of functional analysis in appraisal are examined. Yet, while archival thinkers have focused on function in appraisal, little has been written on…

Since its publication in 2005, Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner's "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing" has led to much discussion and self-examination within the archival community about working through backlogs. This article discusses the impact of Greene and Meissner's work and considers the questions and…

Archivists have begun to rethink the way that they present finding aids to patrons online. They are utilizing user studies to gain a better understanding of what information patrons expect to find and are investigating how to utilize Web 2.0 technologies to better meet patron needs. This article examines how the L. Tom Perry Special Collections is…

In light of numerous discussions about whether to follow Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner's suggestions to process lightly and broadly, valid reasons remain for continuing traditional practices for many literary correspondence collections. In this case study, the authors use the Kenneth Burke Papers in the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania…

This article summarizes the New York State Historical Documents Inventory as experienced at Brooklyn Historical Society. The archives and manuscripts, dating from the seventeenth century and surveyed by the Historical Documents Inventory in the 1980s, were cataloged as Historical Documents Inventory/Research Libraries Information Network records…