Articles

Rates of Processing Manuscripts and Archives

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Abstract

Archivists must constantly balance the amount and kind of material taken into their repositories against the staff available to arrange, describe, preserve, and service it. In order to coordinate a program of arrangement and description and balance the time devoted to processing against that spent on other elements of an archival program, it is useful for the archivist to have a sense of how long it takes to arrange and describe papers. Without this knowledge, the archivist is unable to set realistic priorities and project the completion of processing assignments. For budget purposes, too, it is important to understand processing time requirements, since staff time is the largest expense involved in processing.' Although the role of the archivist's intuition is enormous, good planning should also draw on whatever concrete evidence is pertinent. The project on which this paper is based was designed to explore estimates of processing rates that appeared in fifty-five grant proposals submitted to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Grant proposals are a useful source of processing estimates, because the archivist requesting funding is obliged to justify requests for staff.

How to Cite:

Lynch, K. T. & Lynch, T. E., (1982) “Rates of Processing Manuscripts and Archives”, Archival Issues 7(1), 25–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/archivalissues.8177