10th July 2011, 02:29 PM
My 2 penneths worth is that quite often Archaeologists and Museum staff are partly to blame for the Archive problems, primarily because of their inherent academic nature or lack of experience in logistics. I know its a big brush Im tarring with, but having some insight into both museum archives and archaeology archives, it would seem to me that other than the most obvious of problems (lack of funding, lack of space and shear collection size) the problem is not having people who are experienced enough in dealing with these logistical problems and thus clearing the hurdle to archive bliss. In a perfect world, if private contractors could be hired in to archive what is often quite frankly a mess of cardboard boxes and associated files, then this would in turn free up the Archaeologists and Museum staff to concentrate on processing their work-loads so that a back-log of work doesn't begin. It makes business sense - and to those museums who have done this, taking the plunge has proved to be worthwhile.
As a little example of why I feel that sometimes the staff are just as equally to blame; having spent time in one London Museum, I learned that it took a small team over a year to process 3 million artifacts, most of which they did not know they even had (this I am told is common) - however efficiency was only achieved after a change of staff to guys who had prior experience in other commercial/civil service industries, who understood how to quickly and efficiently secure items and log them for storage in an appropriate mannor. Now the only problem that was left was the storage conditions, and unfortunately no amount of expertise can turn a cardboard box into a hermetically sealed plastic box (a money factor), but nevertheless the crew used their ingenuity to make the best out of what really was a bad situation. And all of a sudden a warehouse full of boxes, some being stored inside silly places like tanks, was transformed into an orderly archive of Medieval (A-Z), Crimea (A-Z), Boer (A-Z), WW1 (A-Z) and so on. With a digital database of the typoligised artifacts and their location - so that if you were looking for a specific item, you could not only locate the item in storage, but could read up on the description of it. The best one though, was being able to assign collections to the database, so that if you were looking for a specific character, you could see all the associated items the museum had within its collection, and whether any were on loan to other museums. Ahhh I miss those days.
As a little example of why I feel that sometimes the staff are just as equally to blame; having spent time in one London Museum, I learned that it took a small team over a year to process 3 million artifacts, most of which they did not know they even had (this I am told is common) - however efficiency was only achieved after a change of staff to guys who had prior experience in other commercial/civil service industries, who understood how to quickly and efficiently secure items and log them for storage in an appropriate mannor. Now the only problem that was left was the storage conditions, and unfortunately no amount of expertise can turn a cardboard box into a hermetically sealed plastic box (a money factor), but nevertheless the crew used their ingenuity to make the best out of what really was a bad situation. And all of a sudden a warehouse full of boxes, some being stored inside silly places like tanks, was transformed into an orderly archive of Medieval (A-Z), Crimea (A-Z), Boer (A-Z), WW1 (A-Z) and so on. With a digital database of the typoligised artifacts and their location - so that if you were looking for a specific item, you could not only locate the item in storage, but could read up on the description of it. The best one though, was being able to assign collections to the database, so that if you were looking for a specific character, you could see all the associated items the museum had within its collection, and whether any were on loan to other museums. Ahhh I miss those days.