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.

When processing the papers of Luther Gulick, the longtime director/chair of the IPA, yesterday, we encountered this leather case:

It says: “City of Atlantic City, Thomas D. Taggart, Jr., Mayor.” At first we thought it was eyeglasses, or perhaps a checkbook. When we opened the case, this is what we found:

It’s a key to Atlantic City, New Jersey! Some research confirms that Mr. Taggart was the Mayor of that city from 1940-1944. The (faded) inscription reads (as far as we can guess):

“To Luther Gulick, in appreciation of your contributions to the success of UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration] Please use our key often & come- Tom Taggart Mayor Atlantic City 12/5/43.”

Gulick was heavily involved in government postwar rehabilitation and reparations initiatives, and served on the staff of UNRRA as a division chief. Mayor Taggart’s involvement, however, is not immediately clear.

In this post, I’ll talk about what happens in the life of a collection after it’s moved to our offices.

After the project archivist surveyed the IPA Collection, he developed a processing plan. In it, he arranged the large banker’s boxes into rough “series”: similar or related materials that should be kept together and processed as a group.

Generally, archivists try to keep together material that comes to us already arranged in an order or filing system. This principle, called “original order,” supports archivists and researchers in establishing context for the materials. For example, a letter may include an abbreviation like S.W.P.C., but no explanation of what this abbreviation stands for; a letter next to it in a folder may explain that S.W.P.C. stands for “Smaller War Plants Corporation,” a group focusing on military manufacturing during World War II. If these materials were not kept together in the final arrangement, this information would be lost. Archivists often process all the boxes in a series before moving to the next series, to maintain a sense of the context of the material.

When we process a box, the first thing we do is open it and make a quick assessment of its contents. Boxes can be neatly arranged and clearly marked:

Or, they can contain a wide array of materials in no discernable order:

We take note of whether the contents are arranged in folders, because that lets us know whether the materials have already been sorted into groups; if the box has mostly loose material, we may have to create a filing system to organize them. The box below is similar to many boxes in this collection, in that it contains groups of materials wrapped in parcels and tied with string, along with materials grouped in folders:

For a box like this, we will make sure to maintain the groupings marked by the folders and parcel wrappings. These wrappings show us how the IPA used the materials, because they indicate what goes with what.

We also take note of what kinds of material are present in the box. Are there books? Bound reports? Newspapers? Photographs? Typed or handwritten letters? Are there large or oversized materials, such as maps, folded in among the papers? Each of these formats should be stored differently, and the IPA Collection contains all of these formats and many more. Once we have a handle on what we’re dealing with, we can proceed to the next steps.