When you’ve done a brief survey of the contents of a box, you know what sort of material you’ll be working with. To process a box, you work through, folder by folder (or, if no folders are present, loose paper by loose paper!). Each folder’s contents should be taken out and inspected for preliminary preservation issues. In particular, with this collection, we are focusing on removing paper clips and any rusty staples we encounter.

It is important that we maintain any groupings of papers that had been stapled or clipped together, so once we remove the fastener, we wrap the grouping with a folder slip made with acid-free paper. While this does not hold the grouping together permanently, it indicates that the papers belong together, and also allows a researcher to leaf through the grouping without risking a tear of the papers where they had been stapled or clipped.

We also note the presence of newsprint. Newspapers are printed on highly acidic and fragile paper, which has a tendency both to crumble with age and to stain paper next to it. To address this, we either photocopy the news clipping onto acid-free paper and dispose of the original, or interleave it with acid-free paper.

Each folder present in the original box is replaced with an archival-quality folder, which helps ensure long-term preservation of the papers inside. If we need to expand the folder to accommodate a wider packet, we use a special tool called a bone folder to crease the bottom of the folder. (This is one of my favorite things to do!)

Similarly, if a report is bound using a comb binder or other folder like the one below, we remove it and place it in a new archival folder.

The folders are labeled with the collection title, the folder’s title, and dates (if available). Since this is such a large collection, for some series we are placing each processed folder in a large archival banker’s box, in case we need to do some rearranging before we establish the folder’s permanent location. Eventually, we will place all the folders in archival boxes like this:

In the next part of the “Processing a Box” series, we’ll discuss how we process a box when no folders are present and we have to establish groupings ourselves.