Assignment #5: Response to Greene & Meissner

The authors of "More Product, Less Process" seem determined to separate the access & preservation activities undertaken by archivists. As diametrically opposed as they may seem, access & preservation are intricately linked and attempts to provide one without the other may lead to dire consequences for our cultural heritage. Rebecca & Beth have eloquently outlined many of these consequences.
The authors also exhibit a very limited view of the ways processing impacts both access and preservation. As Elspeth noted, minimal processing can lead to limited access. On the other hand, aiming for quantity with a minimal processing policy may result in too much access too quickly. An archive that only processes at the collection-level, providing minimal-to-no series or item level description or conservation, faces the possibility that they will encourage more access than their collections can handle. I have had multiple archivists & curators tell me in the past couple of years that increased web presence of their collections, via published finding aids and web exhibits of digitized objects, has led to increased research interest in the physical collections. This is great news . . . as long as your physical collections have been processed and preserved enough to be viewed and handled by researchers. The "golden minimum" proposed by the authors coupled with a plan to get all of those records and finding aids online would very likely lead to increased interest in the archival collections. But if the collections are only minimally processed at the superficial level, the potential lack of physical stability and/or arrangement at the series or item level will create situations that are more difficult for the researchers and more harmful to the actual objects.

Greene, Mark A. and Dennis Meissner. 2005. "More Product, Less Process: Pragmatically Revamping Traditional Processing Approaches to Deal with Late 20th-Century Collections." American Archivist, 63.2 (Fall/Winter).